Hey there, this is from Constant and you're listening to Bitcoin
for Millennials. Together with my guests on this
podcast, I go on a journey to discover how our current
financial system works, why it's flawed, and why Bitcoin is the
most relevant technology that you, my fellow millennials,
should understand and adopt. In this episode, I'm joined by
Daniel Batten. He's a climate tech investor,
author, and business educator from New Zealand.
He has a passion for sustainable development and entrepreneurship
and spent 10 years training tech CEO's.
His interesting climate tech led him to discover the potential of
Bitcoin as a tool to combat climate change.
He he's elaborated a lot of this in his writings and activities,
counteracting mainstream beliefs and cementing his place as
visionary in the field. His book How to Change the World
with One Pitch, contains blueprint that he now uses to
effectively orange build people on Bitcoin.
I'm super excited to talk to him today.
Welcome man. Thank you.
It's great to be on here. Appreciate the intro.
Yeah and thanks so much for coming on.
I my goal with this podcast is actually to talk to the people
that taught me a lot already on you know the the Internet and
and you're one of them and I absolutely love how how you dove
into the climate aspect of Bitcoin and probably and I think
we'll talk about it, you were you were on the other side
before but you saw the light. So I think it's a fascinating
personal journey as well to to talk about.
So yeah, really happy you're here, man.
Fantastic. Happy to be here.
So on your on your LinkedIn, I saw something that really
interests me. It said you said what really
matters is meditation and knowledge.
The West has made a major contribution to minor things,
but ancient wisdom and meditation can make us happy
people who change the world for the better, just as one flame
can light many lights. What are your thoughts behind
that? You know, it may not strike you
as a natural synergy with Bitcoin, but I found it
absolutely is. If you're going to write about
Bitcoin and how it's a positive force for fighting climate
change, then you better be ready for #1 being criticized by
people within the Bitcoin ecosystem who say that climate
science is a sham. And #2 being criticized by
people outside the Bitcoin ecosystem who say that the idea
that Bitcoin can do anything positive for the climate is
heresy. So being comfortable with having
people call you an idiot on a regular basis, unless you just
have this supremely natural glow of maybe having been brought up
in a really well loved environment for many years and
just having great natural resilience, which I didn't have
the benefit of, Then you've got to look for other ways to build
that resilience. And I think a lot of people will
avoid situations where they're going to be criticized on a
regular basis. And that's a shame because it
stops you growing, it stops you leaning in and it stops you
making a contribution. And the other alternative is
you, you toughen up and there's different ways to do it.
Some people do it by counter punching, but my technique is
just honestly, meditation has been the way where I can see
beyond my instant reaction, which is still there.
But these days I have a bit more impulse control.
I can see the person where they're coming from their
perspective. So it's just been an incredibly
invaluable tool for me and I think as well, on my Bitcoin
journey. Sometimes when I thought in the
early days I was going crazy, when my intellect was telling me
that Bitcoin was net positive for the environment and I was
just looking at the data and saying no, this cannot be true.
But the the intuition was saying keep going, keep going.
You're on to something here. Even though everyone's telling
you you're a fool and an idiot and you're crazy and you're
greenwashing, you're onto something, keep going.
And and for me, meditation really helped me to trust.
Everyone has an intuition, but it helped me to trust it more.
Yeah, I I love what you just said.
I feel and and I've talked with a lot of people on this podcast
actually about the same thing. Like with Bitcoin is not only a
knowledge thing like you, there's lots of dimensions that
you can learn about. But this personal journey that's
intertwined with that is just as important, right?
As you said, like and I've exact the same experience, right?
You think in a rational way through certain dimension of
Bitcoin and you end up at a certain place with a certain
realization and you think no, this this cannot be true.
It cannot be this big right like you like the further you zoom
out with the you know and and like the what the effect that it
could have and implications and so then your ego starts talking
right like no, you're probably wrong or this is like you're
crazy or or something like that right.
And as you just explained it and also I think how I see it like
this meditation helps you keep keep you grounded right and also
understand. The ego in check.
The ego can be exactly in the positive or the negative.
Like you say, ego doesn't mean you think you're full of it.
Ego can mean you go into self doubt.
That's also ego. Yes, it's a protection also,
right. Correct.
Yeah. So, so that again, transcending
that, getting past that and coming back to what is truth
rather than what's convenient for my ego to believe is
important. And look, there's times when
I've I've wished it was like, oh really?
Is Bitcoin that good for the environment?
That really sucks. Because now when I state the
facts, I'm going to be called an idiot by a lot more people than
if it wasn't as good. But again, that's ego, right?
And and part of the ego was like, well, maybe you should
just tone it down a little bit. I had this moment when I was
giving this keynote speech in Logano and I had the decision
about the title. So contender A was Bitcoin is
one of the world's best ESG assets.
OK, contended B was Bitcoin is the world's best ESG asset and I
wanted to give it the first title because it was a little
bit safer. Yes, I didn't risk being called
an idiot by quite as many people.
But when I was looking at the data, I was like, no, the most
accurate description of this talk is actually to use Title B.
Because what the data is telling me is it's not one of the best,
it's the best. And so if I underplay it, I'm
going against the principles of my own book, which is that I'm
being disingenuous. Because to understate is just as
disingenuous as to overstate something.
Because we do it for the same reasons, Because we want we want
to gain something for ourselves and we want to avoid some pain
for ourselves, and that's never a good reason.
So you got to tell the truth. Yeah, it's like intellectually
dishonest either way. Right.
Yeah, either against yourself or or to the benefit of the subject
that that you're talking about. And I'm a Kiwi, I'm a New
Zealander, so we have this habit of understanding everything and
as a culture and that's something that I've challenged a
lot because it's resulted in New Zealand having this.
On one hand it's incredible mentality for innovation and
technology, but on the other hand never really realizing the
fruits of that commercially because we undersell ourselves
so much and giving away technology for song or selling
equity in companies for a song. And that's what I've coached A
lot of CEOs of New Zealand companies is actually to be more
confident in how they deliver what they have.
And because it's something that I recognize in myself that I've
had to fight against because the fear of being perceived as
getting too big for your boots is huge.
We have this thing called tall, tall poppy syndrome, which is
prevalent in this culture where it's something you rise up too
high, you get shot down and you learn that from right early on
in school. Being ahead of the crowd, above
the crowd is not appreciated. So fitting in being in the
middle of the pack is everything, and so you're
fighting against some really entrenched cultural patterns of
behavior there. Yeah.
I wonder if there's like other subjects besides Bitcoin that
could actually challenge you in a personal way to to transcend
that, right. Like what you just said I I
again I have the same experience, right?
Like I know myself and then I'm an investigative rationale
hopefully honest person right. And sometimes with whatever
subjects that I researched in the past, right, you get to
certain points where you think, like, OK, this is now my
understanding and thus my belief, right?
But you still doubt yourself for whatever reason.
Yeah, maybe it's culture, or you're a bit insecure, or
there's something with your ego, right?
But with Bitcoin, I know. And I see that with you too.
Like, I know that I know. Right.
And so there's some point you just know, and it's the point at
which for me it took about two months and there was a lot of
questioning during that time. And what I went through, I went
through this process. So I liken it to a due diligence
process on a company. And I said, OK, if I was going
to do due diligence on technology, that's what I should
do on Bitcoin. So I looked at it objectively
and due diligence means you don't believe anyone.
Yeah, you believe data and you know need to know the right data
and you need to know when someone's bullshitting you.
And so. Am I asking the question, Sir?
Yeah. By asking the question the same.
Role. Yes, exactly.
Yeah. So turns out being an investor
in a technology company is a really good qualification to
deciding whether Bitcoin has good ESG credentials or not.
Because you get very good at being skeptical of everyone that
the pro Bitcoin and the anti Bitcoin perspective.
And I was to start with. So I was very skeptical.
When anyone from the Bitcoin ecosystem told me it was good
for the environment. I was skeptical.
But I was also equally skeptical when someone who was against
Bitcoin told me that it was bad for the environment.
And so with that skepticism I just inquired into.
And so the only thing that was gonna change my perspective from
skepticism, universal skepticism, was a sound logic,
Good data, contemporary data, representative data, and using
apples for apples comparisons and also having a sense of
longevity. So by that I mean I knew enough
from looking at climate tech that simply statements like
technology X is bad for the environment or has harmful
environment effects. That's a nonsense statement
because it's. Every.
Every technology is bad for the environment.
Every technology harms the environment.
Solar harms the environment. Wind harms the environment.
Carbon sequestration harms the environment, causes much more
carbon to go into the air than it takes out.
But we, we persevere with these technologies because we believe
that at some point there'll be a tipping point and the scales
will change and will become positive.
And so I started to look at the rubric of you have to give a
technology a certain amount of grace period to prove itself,
but you also have to look at the trajectory.
You see that it's not just green washing.
So I looked at all those factors and what I found universally was
that the arguments against Bitcoin used old data.
They used non representative data and they used bad data.
They used metrics which were either made-up or not
meaningful, or lacked context. And they made statements which
lacked context, such as, for example, Bitcoin is powered
mostly by fossil fuels. That's true.
But the context is so does every technology in the world that
uses the grid, because that's not actually measuring the
emissions of Bitcoin, it's measuring the emissions of the
underlying network. So there was a lot of
decontextualized information that relied on populations not
having a good understanding of that context.
And the the only reason you ever do that, it's it's typically not
an innocent mistake. It's typically because you have
gone out of your way to try to malign something.
Yes, yes, to make it look worse than it is.
So I found a lot of that on the anti Bitcoin side and then I
went to the pro Bitcoin side and I expected to see just as much
spin and subterfuge and all those techniques.
So I went in skeptical. I heard statements like it's
good for the grid, it builds out the grid.
I said how how much Show me and and there wasn't a lot of
evidence that there was some evidence, but it could wasn't
quantified well. So I said well that's good, but
let's investigate And I kept on investigating.
I said, well, look, it does have potential, you're right.
But it hasn't been quantified. And that's not an argument
against it. It just means that you can't
make that claim with any force until you've done some
quantification. And so I started to ask, OK,
let's start to quantify. I got curious and I said, well,
what have I quantified? It doesn't look like it's that
hard. This could be quantified and I
started to and the more I quantified, I thought, holy
crap, this is it. This actually could be really,
really good. And I looked at things such as
its capacity to accelerate renewable transition, its
capacity to make renewable operations more profitable, the
amount of emission reduction that it could cause to a just
generally on a grid. And then I got fascinated, as
you know, with the whole methane mitigation question.
And one of the reasons I got fascinated with this is it's
just so easy to measure. You can measure directly if
you're using a power source, which is methane going into the
air and you stop that going into an air and you pipe it into a
generator instead with a bit of purification first so it doesn't
mess up the generator. And then so that could become
and create a landfill or a farm or wastewater facility or an oil
field which has a had a flare stack or was even venting it
worse and you put it into a generator, you can measure
exactly how many emissions would have gone into the environment
which are now not going into the environment which had been used
for Bitcoin mining. And I started to get really,
really fascinated by that. And I thought, you know what?
This is actually, not only is this, let's be really clear
right now. It's not negative, it's not
positive for the environment or we can't say that it is.
But the important thing is that it actually is trending in that
direction and there's no question.
So it's a little bit like where solar was in 19 in the early
1990s, where solar had this massive carbon debt for a long
time because it uses coal furnaces to melt the silicon at
14114° huge, so carbon debt and it didn't pay it off until the
2000 and 10s, around 2018 I believe it was.
So that's a long time. It was invented the 1950s,
that's 70 years almost that it's taken 60 something years to pay
off its carbon debt. Bitcoins going to do it in less
than half the time on its current trajectory, which is
massive and it's just going to keep on going and going and
going and it and again, yes it has e-waste issues, but again
every technology has e-waste issues.
My old Macintosh though thrown out has an e-waste waste issue
and I tried to use it for as long as I possibly could.
Solar has an e-waste issue and it's much harder to dispose of
them than it is a Bitcoin mining.
So again, you have to look at these things in context.
You have to do apples for apples comparisons and you have to look
at the long term trajectory of a technology.
And simple stuff like if you're measuring the health of a
business and you're an auditor and you come back and you say
this business is in terrible shape and someone says how do
you know that? He said, well, I looked at its
expenses and they're off the charts and they said, well, what
about its revenue? So I didn't measure that and
they'd fire you because that's gross incompetence.
And yet it's seen as perfectly acceptable that someone should
go in and evaluate a technology and only look at the expense
line, IE the negative environmental externalities, and
say this technology is terrible. And then someone says, what
about positive environmental technologies?
Oh come on, it doesn't have any. Don't be ridiculous.
That's Screen Wash You'd fire the person.
You say, no, you're not being objective.
You have to look at both. You have to objectively access
both, And only when you've done that are you in a position to
make any sensible statement about the net benefit of this
technology. And then it's only at a point in
time you have to look at trajectory.
How's it tracking through time? Is it getting worse?
Is it the same? Is it better?
And none of this analysis was occurring.
And So what I wanted to do is introduce some of the rigor that
someone who was evaluating climate technology would apply
to Bitcoin. And once you do that, you get a
completely different picture and it's very much that it has the
potential to be Nick positive. And even today you can say that
across six different metrics, it's become the number one ESG
asset in the world, which is phenomenal.
Yeah, and fascinating to the ego.
Yeah. There's so much to unpack here.
Like, I've been on your side as well.
Like on the investor side, I've seen hundreds of thousands of
thousands of pitches, decks, all that stuff.
And I love what you said about that.
All those decks, you know, all the graphs go up and to the
right, you know, and pitching an investor like that moment for an
entrepreneur, I always viewed as like I am.
I'm at a baseline. I'm at 0.
I have no expectations. I didn't prep.
You decide what You tell me, right.
This is your moment. So you decide what's in the deck
and what the what the graphs represent and all these things.
Right? And you're the expert telling me
why this is a good business, right?
So you're like positively critical.
Your stance is like, OK, well show me, right.
But then if I am the base layer zero and I can shoot holes in
your story, then that is already a big signal that you don't know
what you're talking about, right?
Or you're outset, just like you said.
Like the the outset is flawed right?
Like oh I'll I'll try to convince Daniel to give me money
by selling this. You know, unsubstantiated.
If your methodology it's fundamentally flawed, it's
you're going to, you're going to see it like that.
Exactly right. If you so this way if you if you
tell me Bitcoin is using mostly fossil fuel, I'm not going to
go, oh, OK, I'm going to go, yeah, prove it, show me the
data. Where did that data come from?
How do you know it's accurate? What date did you gather the
data? How do you know that the
jurisdictions you got it from are accurate?
And show me your methodology. I'm going to look straight for
the the section and the methodology which says
limitations. And so that's what I did with
the Cambridge model. It's like, OK, step one, look at
the statistics. Step 2, go to the limitation
sections of the model. That's what I do with any model,
whether it's positive or negative.
Yeah. And then re.
Limitation 2017 or something right there, today and then.
It said, and then there are two key bits of information there.
It said, well, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically we haven't
updated our mining map since January the 1st, 2021, OK?
And I kind of put a mental note and I had a question which is,
is Bitcoin mining A dynamic system like changes in political
opinions, such that being one year out of date really matters?
And I had that question because it was only that was about a
year ago when I first discovered that.
Or is it so stable that it doesn't matter because that's a
that's a flaw, but it's not necessarily a meaningful flaw.
So you have to be, you have to be kind as well, you can't be
too critical because all models have flaws, including my own
models. And then the second thing which
intrigued me was it said we don't include off grid mining.
So then I had a second question. I thought, OK, is that a
meaningful omission? I said well to in order for it
to be meaningful, two things would have to be true.
There would have to be a lot of off grid mining and it would
need to be heavily weighted in a way which is different to on
grid mining. Either it uses a lot more fossil
fuel or a lot less compared to on grid.
So then I went out of my way to say, Oh well, let's measure that
stupid idea six months later, spending way too long at it.
Finally I had, you know, the first signs of that data and it
was by number means complete. And it still has taken about a
year and a half and it's still not complete because no one
knows how many off grid miners there are.
But the interesting thing is that of the off grid mining we
do know about which it's it's 30% of the entire network and
that's a minimum remember because it could be much higher.
And in fact we know that it's probably higher because there's
there's a disparity between if you model and you total up the
hash rate and you look at the actual hash rate, there's a gap
and those people are almost certainly off grid mining
somewhere. We just don't know where.
But what we do know is we know the mix of those known off grid
miners is 75% percent weighted towards sustainable electricity
use, 75% the on grid miners are using 45% sustainable
electricity. So if you have a model which
excludes 30% of your population who are using 75% versus 45% of
a fuel mix, that's going to make a massive difference to the
overall statistic. And it does.
It's the difference between the Cambridge model, if it was up to
date should say 45%. If it was assuming all mining
was happening on grid. But if you factor an off grid as
well, it brings it up to 54%. Now is that significant?
Well, it's very significant because all the news outlets,
the EU Commission, Greenpeace, environmental organizations,
environmentalists around the world, lobbyists all rely on
that Cambridge data. And that Cambridge data is
telling us that most of bitcoins fuel use is fossil fuel.
Whereas we know because of model limitations that it's highly
likely that Bitcoin is using at least 54% sustainable
electricity and that's due to meaningful exclusions from the
model. The analogy that I use, it's
imagine if you wanted to predict the result of an election and
Cambridge's Cambridge will say, well, the reason we don't
include off grid is it's really hard to gather that data, which
is true if you're an academic. If you're an academic and you're
used to gathering data by doing the the methods that academics
use, right, which is inquiring existing literature and building
models, but not doing field research, not talking to actual
miners, not engaging with communities for the most part,
then yes, it's going to be extremely hard to get that data.
So you have to actually talk to people.
You have to actually mix with people who are Bitcoin miners,
and that's not called compromising your objectivity,
that's called gathering data, that's called doing field
research. So you have to augment a
theoretical model with a field research based approach and only
then you get a hybrid model which builds up into something
meaningful. Now I went into the weeds in
that because the consequences of this are enormous.
The consequence of getting that data wrong could mean that the
EU Commission could decide to ban Bitcoin mining in Europe, or
at least conclude that Bitcoin mining is bad for the
environment, which in turn triggers A domino effect which
eventually learns to an outright ban in Europe.
All based on some fundamental flaws in a model, which are
stated on the Cambridge website. But what's not stated is the
impact of those exclusions because they themselves don't
know, because they haven't done that field research.
So. So that's an example of just
where I'm going to get into the weeds.
I'm going to, you know, query some sacred cows.
It's not about where the data is convenient to gather or where
that happens to correspond with you, the the the methods of data
gathering that you're familiar with and comfortable with.
That's got nothing to do with it.
If you're going to predict the result of an election, you can't
just say, hey, it's inconvenient to survey rural voters.
So we're only going to do a survey of of urban voters.
And then you come up with some results and some people say,
well, you didn't survey rural voters.
We know they're going to be more conservative.
So of course this is going to be look more liberal than it
actually is. And then you get the actual
election and yeah. But is that clumsiness or is
that on purpose? Like what?
What are your faults there? Nothing to do with clumsiness.
It's to do it. It's to do with.
It's to do with the fact that it's hard, If you're an academic
to do field research, it's really hard.
But it's also a choice to not add a big disclaimer on the
front page of your report. That's actually my.
Age of criticism? So I think you know Cambridge
deserve credit for being transparent about their model
limitations. However, they deserve criticism
by not making that the headline. Exactly, yeah.
And there should be a huge disclaimer.
Their defenses, they say we have to start somewhere.
But the problem is by starting somewhere everyone looks at the
Cambridge and they know this. They look at the Cambridge
model, they look at the Cambridge brand, they go, oh
Cambridge, I must be right. And then they look at Bitcoin
mining council and they say, well that's industry bottle
body, that must be wrong. And then they look at this guy
Daniel Ben and they say who's he?
It's not even P result, he's just some Bitcoin maxi.
But I'm not. But that's what it looks like to
the outside because I'm so favorably disposed towards
Bitcoin. But that's not because I bought
a whole lot of Bitcoin in the early days and then had some
self fulfilling prophecies I wanted to fulfill and make out.
It was good. Which is what a lot of
environmentalists assume it was because I actually, I had no
interest in Bitcoin at all and I got interested in Bitcoin mining
before I got interested in Bitcoin.
That came second. I had no interest in Bitcoin.
I had some theoretical interest but but it was like maybe you
know, 20th down on a list of things that I was interested in.
Yeah, so, so there was a very different standpoint that I came
to understand it. So, so the the issue with
Cambridge here is that it's not enough to put it in the small
print. When you know that people are
depending upon your brand and your reputation to make far
reaching intergenerational decisions around mining policy,
you should have this massive disclaimer that say this number
here is likely to be understating sustainable energy
use because it excludes off grid mining.
And we haven't brought the model up to date until such time as
we've added these things in this figure is no longer trustworthy.
Yeah, that would be true transparency.
And isn't this also like a clash of like old and new world in a
sense I have to also think about what we saw yesterday with the
ETF launch where certain banks don't allow their customers to
buy it because it doesn't align etcetera.
Like this goes back to, I almost almost want to say the beginning
of our conversation about this ego or not being aware of of
yourself and how you feel or how you like operate.
I almost want to say right, Because when you do research and
you end up with a conclusion that you are uncomfortable with,
that doesn't mean that the conclusion is not right, you
know? And so as you just mentioned,
Cambridge doesn't give this disclaimer.
They know. They have, you know, a certain
power in the world with sharing their knowledge, right.
And so it's kind of it. It is disingenuous in a way
because they know, you know, what their method was and and
they decide not to give this disclaimer And what has helped
me a lot in Bitcoin as well, like, the hardest thing I think
is challenging your own beliefs, right?
Like you end up with a certain conclusion based on rationale
and then you're like, Oh no, this is like totally against
what I thought was true. But when you get over that, you
know, then I think Bitcoin clicks more on one sense.
But you are also incentivized. And I think that's for me the
deeper meaning also of Bitcoin. It's a mutual beneficial
technology basically, right? Like it's I'm incentivized not
because of the number go up. I'm incentivized because I am
forced to follow not only my intuition but what I know is
true. And that is what gives me the
personal struggle. And you see in the old world
that people kind of yeah, they they they don't even start
struggling basically, right. They they just well say I'm
Cambridge and this is the this is the number and who is Daniel
Batten from New Zealand on Twitter.
But that is a disingenuous thing.
It's a it's a it's a weak frame almost a personal weak frame
where these people just stay in the, yeah, same same way of
working or thinking and not challenging themselves like I
yeah, I find that fascinating that their incentive is that and
our incentive is just amplifying what we understand is the truth.
One of the things that running a technology company teaches you
is that to to beat your competition, it's not enough to
be better. You have to be 10 times better
at what you do because the the power that comes with the brand
of the people you're up against and the marketing engines and
the history and the established relationship is so strong that
you you have to be 10X better to get traction.
And that's true in knowledge transfer as well.
If you want to go up and say, you know Cambridge is wrong and
I'm right and not just look like you're arrogant, then you've got
to you. You can't just have a slightly
better model. You've got to have a model
that's way better, that's way more robust, that's way more
nuanced that and that your articulation about why Cambridge
is is wrong has got to be so on point, has got to be expressed
in a way which is still respectful because they have
done good work to put that model out there.
And it is has been for a long time the best model.
And they were The Pioneers and it was accurate up until two
years ago. And what's happened is that
since that two years, mining's moved off grid and their focus
has moved off Bitcoin onto Ethereum due to resource
constraints. And so there's a whole lot of
things you just gotta be good at.
And then even then it's hard. You got your work stack up
because of course you're a nobody from the edge of the
earth saying, look, you should use our model or you should use
our software or you should use our technology.
It's better. And Bitcoin has had this problem
as well, where it's very clear to me now that it's sound money
and that Fiat is not. But to start with it, it looks
like an upstart. And you have this, an entrenched
system which has the brand, which has the trust, which has
the reputation, which has the trusted networks had all these
things. So again, it's not enough that
bitcoins better than fair. It has to be 10 times, not even
10 * 100 * 1000 times better when you're going to challenge a
monetary system. So everything disruptive is
always going to be order of magnitude better to get hold,
and everything disrupted will always be attacked by the people
who have a vested interest in making sure that they are not
displaced. Yeah, this is what Jeff Booth
describes in a really great post of him.
It's, I think it's called the Great Game.
And he talks exactly about this, right?
Because you're fighting a monopoly that is already, you
know, intertwined with systems and everyday life and and and
all these things. So you have to not only be
better, but also be able to show how you're how you're better and
also keep continuing doing that right.
Like just being there, like saying, OK, a Bitcoin is
inevitable. That is not going to work.
That's also, by the way, what I love about your work, that
you're just relentless and you just keep going.
So yeah, I think that's very admirable.
But what what is like a personal belief that made you not get
Bitcoin? Then when you encountered it,
what was? What was your thing?
It was. It was interesting.
I made a mistake. So back in 2000, and it was
actually my wife who got it. I didn't want to.
So I first heard about it in, well, 2014.
I thought that's never going to change anything.
And even it does, Money is not that meaningful.
We money is just money. It's just a method of
transacting. It's not fundamental to how
society operates. So I dismissed it.
And then I heard about it again in 2016 when a friend of mine,
Willy Woo, was talking about it and he's like, Oh no, you should
get some Bitcoin. It's really good.
And he'd started to look into it deeply at that stage, and I
hadn't. And I was.
And he talked to me a little bit about it.
I just. I couldn't get overly excited.
I understood why money was broken cuz I'd gone through that
learning to some extent during the global financial crisis.
But I thought gold was the solution.
So I didn't see there was a need for another solution other than
gold as a store of value. And then I said, well, as an
investment I should invest in things which I know and which
I'm comfortable about. And that's technology companies.
So I'm gonna keep on investing in technology companies cuz I
don't know about Bitcoin. And for me to know about it,
it's gonna take too much time, which is true.
It does take time to get to know about Bitcoin.
And in order to invest in, you should take that time,
absolutely. But I just wasn't prepared to
invest that time. So you could say it was a
mistake or you could say it just wasn't the right time.
But anyway, I I missed that because of my wife's insistence.
We got a small amount at that time and and held that for for
many years. And then it wasn't till about
2020 that again another conversation Willie said, look,
I really think you should look at this.
And by that stage I missed everything that happened in
2016. So I was like, yeah, maybe
you're right. Maybe I should learn from that
mistake of not listening to you the first time.
So let me look at a little bit more.
And I did. And I thought, OK, this is, this
has got some legs. This is worth a slightly larger
allocation. And then I started to hear all
the environmental stories in about 2021.
I started quite concerned because I was hearing the Elon
Musk's pulling out and I was hearing that China were banning
it because of environmental concerns and at that stage I was
thinking I might have to sell my Bitcoin.
That was actually what came up in my mind cuz it already what
had happened in the global financial crisis.
I'd bought gold and then I saw a documentary on gold about how it
resulted in cyanide poisoning of indigenous rivers in the Amazon
ring forest and all sorts of incredibly toxic things that it
does to the environment. And I just thought, I can't hold
this asset anymore for environmental reasons.
I sold and then I was like, oh man, do I have to go and sell
this asset too. Because this asset is also bad
for the environment. And.
And I thought I kind of saw a couple of videos 1 by Andreas
Antonopoulos which was saying that it could green the grid.
And again, I wasn't convinced because there was no
quantification, but it did make me think, OK, he does raise a
good point, which is I should look at investigating whether
the positive externalities have some merits at some point.
I said I don't have bandwidth for doing that now, but it kind
of didn't make me pro Bitcoin. But it said, OK, stay of
execution, I won't sell it. And so then it's kind of neutral
about it. It's like, OK, it's a it's a
good, good investment. I'm not so sure it's good for
the environment. I'm not completely sure it's bad
for the environment either, but I'm somewhere in the middle.
And then it wasn't really till 2022 that I thought, OK, I want
to figure this out for myself. And I was just fortunate that I
had a whole bunch of time And I said, well, I'm going to go down
the rabbit hole. But it wasn't the sound money
rabbit hole, It was the is it good for the environment rabbit
hole, which is a different rabbit hole, but it leads you to
some places which are very similar in terms of realizing
that a lot of institutions you might have trusted, you realize
aren't so trustworthy. That was one of my conclusions.
It taught me the value of really questioning a lot, doing your
own research, finding people who are real subject matter experts,
not people who just told other people they were subject matter
experts. There were a lot of people
talking about Bitcoin who were called energy experts, but they
weren't because it's not enough to be a so-called energy expert.
You need to understand grids, You need to understand demand
response, you need to understand methane mitigation.
You can know generically about how energy works and know about
none of those three things. And even if you know about all
those three things, you've still got to understand Bitcoin mining
dynamics. You've still got to understand
how different renewable technologies and different
fossil fuel technologies interact with them, and so
there's a lot of knowledge you're intersecting.
So it's more there's no course you can do in this stuff.
It's it's a role of it's as much synthesis of information as it
is analysis of information. And if all you can do is
analysis of information, you analyze a single thread.
So you might analyze, for example, Bitcoin's energy
consumption, and then based on that single lane, you'll make
some conclusions, and the conclusions will be wrong.
Or you might analyze its emissions.
But then again, the conclusions will be wrong because you
haven't factored in trend lines, you haven't factored in positive
externalities, and you haven't factored in questioning the
underlying data set, and you haven't truly understood the
complex interplay between Bitcoin and grids or Bitcoin and
reducing methane emissions. Yeah.
So it's not a simple. Fact it's interesting that you
mentioned that you realized that not everything you thought was
true. It's also like a common theme.
Like what? What are some of those things?
Like what's the main thing that that you realized?
I I realized I knew that you should treat what you read in
the newspapers with a grain of salt, but I never realized
honestly just how bad it was. I I had.
I was like, it was a real wow moment.
The the degree to which things would get like, I'll give you an
example, the the recent publication which went in the
BBC, which was an institution I used to trust a lot, The
independent New York Times, Verge Magazine, Fast Company and
a magazine that I read a lot right for 20 years, had a lot of
respect for all uncritically publishing.
An academic commentary based on some metrics which are debunked
in 2018. Interestingly by Cambridge and
getting headlines wrong. Not understanding the difference
between a Bitcoin transaction and a Bitcoin payment.
Not understanding that a Bitcoin transaction can contain 10
billion payments, so basic emissions in Bitcoin knowledge.
And I was like, this is crazy. And there's this strange
convention where it's deemed that in order to comment or be a
journalist on Bitcoin, you have to hold no Bitcoin, Which is
crazy now, as if somehow by holding the asset somehow
sullies you and makes you ipso facto self interested.
But then they should do that on the other side as well, right,
Like Okay if you don't, but currency?
Yeah. Yeah, like bank account, yeah.
And what are you talking? About Yeah, you have to use, you
have to party, you have to stick some stones and shells to trade.
No. So you are using something.
So you need exposure to everything.
But how we understand things is we understand them by using
them. We understand assets by using
them. If you prevent your journalists
from using the asset they're writing about, yeah, it's as if
saying I'm OK. I'm not going to ever go to a
doctor in my life because I understand how the incentives
work. And I understand when a doctor
prescribes me something, he or she will get a cut of that
prescription. OK.
So they have an inbuilt financial incentive to prescribe
me something to tell me that I'm sick and not to get me well now.
OK, it's good to understand the incentive structure.
It's good to understand that as a risk.
But the conclusion that I should never go to the doctor is
dangerous. And so I might say, well, I'm
not going to go to a doctor. I'm only going to go to physios
because they don't write prescriptions.
So I know I can trust them. That'd be crazy.
Or. Or I'm not going to go to a
dentist because a dentist has a vested interest in putting
amalgams into my teeth, which he or she gets paid for.
So I'm not going to do that. What I'll do is I'll go to an
osteopath because after all, the tooth, just a bone.
So I got an osteopath because they don't put amalgams in my
mouth and they'll give me a good professional opinion.
Clearly that would be ludicrous. But we do the same thing when it
comes to the so-called energy experts.
We don't go to people who understand Bitcoin, We don't go
to people who understand Bitcoin mining because they're deemed to
have a vested interest. And so then we go to these
people who are generalists in the field of energy, don't
understand grids deeply, don't have not done deep dives into
demand response, have certainly not understood or even used
Bitcoin, and certainly do not have a good understanding of
Bitcoin mining. And we asked them to comment on
Bitcoin mining's impact on the environment and on grids, and we
expect to get great results, Crazy.
So it's led to me to distrust the ways that we make decisions,
the ways that we validate whether someone has a worth of
an opinion we should listen to or not.
It's made me realize, and even some of these trusted
institutions as well, the methodologies, it when I was
looking at Cambridge's data I had to pinch myself again and
again. I'm like, no, that it's
Cambridge. Come on, that must be right.
You must be wrong. Don't get too big for your
boots. Again, the ego kicked in.
It's like, no, you must be wrong.
They must be right. They're Cambridge.
But I kept on hanging up and I said no, something's not
matching the the data is wrong, the data is wrong.
And I was lucky that I had a community of other people
understood Bitcoin and energy who really supported me.
They said no, no, no, look here, look, look here at this.
Look at the state. Look at this data point.
I said no, no, keep digging. You're on to something.
There is an anomaly here. They haven't considered this.
Look at these Bitcoin mining companies.
There is a disparity in the renewable energy use.
And also look at why people are going off grid in the 1st place.
They're going off grid because they want cheap power.
Look at the graph of what's happened to power over the last
20 years. It used to be cheap power was
fossil fuel. Now it's all renewable.
So they said, well, doesn't it stand to reason that not because
they're greenies, but simply because of economics that most
of these miners who are off grid because they've gone for cheap
power, that was their number one decision metric most of them
should be using. You would expect that would be
your hypothesis, right? Renewable or sustainable energy?
Yeah, exactly. So that's a lot of questions, a
lot of stuff. Yeah.
Now it's so fascinating that that the thing, like once you
see it, you cannot Unsee it, right?
And it's this is just one subject, right, Bitcoin.
And as we previously talked about, if you end up at a point
where you think this is correct and you know you did all that
work and you know you were intellectually honest and you
challenged your ego and all these things, and then you just
see other people print nonsense, then you know that if it's this
subject, what's happening with other subjects.
That's exactly. Just that's exactly what
happened. Correct.
Yeah.
I said that the only reason that I know that this is nonsense is
I don't know the subject deeply. This is the only subject that I
know deeply in the world. Exactly right.
I don't know any other subjects deeply.
This is the only one. This is the only subject of
research this deeply because you simply don't have bandwidth.
But yes, by extension you think, wow, there's probably other
people like me who've done a lot of research within their
expertise who are reading these reports going what a load of
bullshit and but we don't know who they are if we're outside
that domain. Just in the same way that most
people outside the Bitcoin ecosystem will probably never
see this podcast, right? I mean, we'd like to see think
that a lot of people will that the reality.
Yeah, that'd really fun. That'd be amazing, but it's it's
how do you do that? How do you cross pollinate
between one group of, you know, wacky autistic people and
another group who who've been crazy enough to go deep into the
weeds and find that knowledge? Yeah, but they exist everywhere.
But we're not interconnected enough.
It would be great if somehow we could connect all these people
who were crazy enough to go so deep and down the rabbit hole in
their particular area, where it's Bitcoin, where it was
something else. Connect them all together,
because we probably stand quite a good chance of furthering
human knowledge if we did so. And it wouldn't be the
university. So it would be like a
peer-to-peer network of autistic people.
Yeah, well it's actually interesting and and then we'll
move on. But on Twitter and you too by
the way, there was a there was a thing this last week.
We in all these other subjects, I have not seen people who say I
will debate anyone, anyone you know, whatever the subject is.
Anyone can debate me on what I'm saying about whatever mandates,
right? Or certain technology or
electrification of cars or whatever.
In Bitcoin, everyone says it. Everyone says come debate me.
If you hate Bitcoin, come debate me.
If you think it's bad for the environment, come debate me.
And no one is showing up, right. And that that is also for me,
like a very big signal, right? Like if you shout from the
rooftops, come debate me. I know you're honest, like I
know you did it right. Like they saw the YouTube.
Video between Alex de Vries and the Norden They saw what
happens. Yes, when the bitcoiner is given
the right of reply, it's brutal. Yeah, that's it.
But that's it, right? And I think for people listening
who maybe are still on the fence about this Bitcoin interesting
or something, like, I use this as a signal for myself, right?
Where it's more like the social behavior you see, where it's
like, OK, so someone is intellectually honest and the
other one is just emotional, right.
Well then you already know who who clearly did more more work
and and it should be signal for you to also learn more about you
know, whatever the subject is in this case Bitcoin.
I want to ask you two hopefully short questions.
Let's see. But before we jump into the
book, I I just wanted to test now that we are talking like, I
have a case in my head where I think that for renewable
investments there is a case to be made that you can have more
than 100% ROI, right? Like just a simple explainer,
like there's a lot of wind windmill parks in my country.
A lot of them are not turning even when the wind blows, right?
Because the grid cannot take that electricity.
You can argue that if you invested in the hardware and
it's not turning, you're losing money, right?
So your goal should be to have them turn whenever the wind
blows, even when the grid. You know, even when the demand
from from the consumers is not there, right?
The only thing you can make that work is when you add Bitcoin
miners to that, right? So then you will have 100% ROI
on the usage of the hardware. Then you have 100% ROI on the
usage or consumption of the energy that's created.
And then you have more than 100% return because what you use that
energy for Bitcoin, right. So, so this is of course what
miners do. You can sell that or hold that
for it to accrue value. I totally don't like, does that
make sense to you? And and second question, I
totally don't understand why governments are not doing this
like it. It makes no sense to me.
It feels like you're wasting money investing in this hardware
and then not utilizing it fully. Governments get voted out when
they do things which people believe are bad for the
environment. So if enough and doesn't even
have to be bad for the environment, but if they fear
that environmental NGOs will tell them that they're doing
something bad for the environment, there's
environmental NGOs have a lot of lobbying power.
Yeah. And so one of the communities
that politicians are most scared of is environmental NGOs.
And so even if they come to believe that Bitcoin is good for
the environment, the fear of being labeled, particularly in
Europe, as someone who is doing something which is counter to
climate change is immense. And so they'll avoid it, the
course of brand reputational damage.
So you've got that to fact with in terms of your question around
is it feasible to get this sort of ROI, absolutely it is.
And we already know from that Cornell Cornell University study
that using Bitcoin mining in concert with either solar or
wind operations will make them more profitable.
Yeah, exactly. There is a local Bitcoin mining
company that uses hydro who's been doing some analysis that
suggested that it makes some 50% more profitable, which is huge.
And that all gets reinvested into, guess what, more solar or
more wind. Just like all businesses, they
want to reinvest their property, their profits into their
business. So that means more wind
generation, more solar generation.
So not ludicrous at all, and not only is it not ludicrous, but
now there's some pretty reputable peer reviewed research
that backs up that this is absolutely possible and you're
going to see that get more and more quantified over the next
two years. So we'll be able to look at it
and we will say if it's a wind farm of this magnitude and you
have this much Bitcoin mining, you can expect this much more
profitable in these circumstances.
It's going to get much more nuanced.
So that's quite exciting because not only does that change the
narrative, but but then it becomes harder for politicians
to be fearful because as data is your best weapon against FUD,
you fight FUD with fact. And so the more fact that comes
in, the more the FUD starts to disappear.
Yeah, it's amazing how also in this sector, Bitcoin forces
transparency, right? To back up whatever your claim
is. So you when you claim that there
is a certain incentive like, you know, I just did, you say we're
gonna have the data that can actually back that up, right?
And there's not a lot of technologies where that is
actually done. So transparent, I'd say.
So, yeah, for me that's fascinating that Bitcoin, yeah,
forces you to do that. Like you cannot have empty
claims. You have to do and show the work
basically. Well, again, it's here to be 10
* 100 times better. So because of all the FUD and
because you're not the incumbent, and because
everyone's telling it's spoiling the oceans, you have to be so
much better at measuring. You have to be so much more
measurably better. You have the order of magnitude
better. Your research has to be better.
Your your exception handling has to be better.
Your method of articulating it has to be better.
Everything has to be better. So the positive about all this
fun is it forces people to be really good at articulating the
story of working out the the most environmentally beneficial
outcomes and researching those outcomes and then chasing them
as well. So fun has actually accelerated
the environmental narrative of Bitcoin.
Love it. That's great.
Yeah, but. We wouldn't have gone look, it
wouldn't have gone as fast if it hadn't been fought so strongly
and there hadn't been so many false narratives.
Yeah, yeah. No, it's amazing.
It's it's exactly, I think, what the ethos is of Bitcoin or what
Bitcoin stands for. Like, OK, try me and I will show
you like I can show you. Yeah, I find it beautiful.
One other small thing before we go to the book.
Are you familiar with the software book from Jason Lowry?
I have a thesis. I know a little bit about it.
I don't know the core thesis. Yes.
OK, yeah, so just one thing to share.
Like I once tweeted to Jason, I said, if I understand correctly,
you say power projection will always be here, right?
So countries will fight over resources.
They will project their power over each other.
And you say, you know, his case is that that will be done
through hash wars, computing power wars, right.
So whoever has the most computing power and can protect
that through Bitcoin, that's his case, right?
You can, yeah. Keep your power in the world and
project your power over others, right.
So I tweeted him, OK, so if this is the case and the people who
adopt this hash power are incentivized, as you just
mentioned, right, to look for the most sustainable ways or
cheapest ways to create this power.
Basically, are we going to, like, save the world by waging
war? Right.
Is it going to be a greener world by saving war, Right.
We're accepting that we will always have this war.
But the other side of that is that we make the planet greener.
And he said yes. And so I wanted to check with
you what you think of that. Yeah, I agree.
It makes total sense because well, The only exception to that
will be, I would see it a little differently.
There is one exception and that is if you're in a country where
your cheapest, I think it's more governed by what's the cheapest
source of electricity rather than what's the most
sustainable. It's just by historical
accident. Oh, that's what I mean.
Yeah. You have to invest in the.
Yeah, Yeah. We we are very fortunate that
Bitcoin has come at a time in history which has happened to
coincide where the cheapest source is renewable.
Bitcoin had come 20 years earlier, it'd be a very
different story because the cheapest source would be coal.
So there's there's been some luck here uncategorically.
Now in most of the world, we're fortunate that the cheapest
source will be sustainable. However, there'll be some
countries where it's not. In Russia it's going to be
natural gas, In some other parts of the world it'll be something
else. So it's likely that you'll see,
I would say, a proliferation of mining in different countries, a
proliferation of people trying to secure hash rate, absolutely
the cheapest cost possible. Will that lead everyone to be
green? I I think it'll be more that
it'll lead everyone to try and be cheap and to find new ways to
utilize stranded and wasted energy.
And we're just lucky that that happens in most cases to be
places like wind farms built in the wrong place or not near a
major population center or with a grid that doesn't have the
capacity to take all that surplus wind power.
When you get 92 hours concurrently of Gale force winds
in North Germany and all your power genre power users are in
South Germany and the grid can't take it.
Or you have some landfills which just emitting methane freely
into the air and you can't utilize that power and you can't
connect them to the grid, that is where people will compete.
Stranded energy, Wasted energy, Cheap energy.
Energy which no one else can use.
Yeah. So it forces the innovation to
actually forces innovation that energy, right?
Yeah. Harvesting of wasted energy.
All right. Well, thanks for answering.
Like now that I was talking to you, I I really wanted to, you
know, hear your thoughts on that.
If we move to your book, it's called How to Change the World.
With One pitch you lay out principles of a four step system
that you say anyone can apply to, you know, help, help
Bitcoiners, Orange Bill or or at least trigger others to to
Orange Bill themselves. What can we walk through the
framework like why is it so effective?
Where did this come from? It it came from my obsession
with synthesizing knowledge. And as we're talking about
beforehand, if if you try analysis without synthesis,
you're gonna, you're gonna miss some key things out.
And so when it comes to expressing ideas, there were a
lot of resources and books around about how to create a
great message. But then you've also got to
deliver that message. No one wants to see a great
script delivered by some lousy actors, so you've got to deliver
it. Hey, OK, Everyone gets that, OK?
It's got to got to be good. Message got to be well
delivered. OK.
But then there's another dimension, which is the tactics.
You've got to be tactically smart.
If you have the wrong strategy, it's like if you're talking to a
community and you don't understand what they care about
most, what their values are. You can have a wonderful
message, beautifully articulated, and it's off
target. It's like trying to hit a target
with an arrow when you're blindfolded.
And so being tactically smart is equivalent of taking that
blindfold off and knowing your audience, to the extent that
before you even open your mouth, you understand which are the
right arrows to unleash the arrows of logic, The arrows of
points, the arrows of inspirational messages, the
arrows of understanding an issue and speaking to it in a way
which is likely to be heard. So that's a tactical dimension.
The third dimension and the 4th dimension is more important than
any of those other three. It's the most subtle, but it's
actually the most powerful. And that's the mindset you're in
before you open your mouth. And this is where a lot of
people go wrong on Twitter, and it loops right back beautifully
to how we started, which is OK. You've got wonderful tactics,
you've got a great message. You deliver them beautifully,
but at the point you come to say it, what you're thinking is this
person is such an idiot, why don't they get it?
I'm guilty of that, yeah. Yeah, me too.
Me too. Then nothing You say will land
and so agree. Again.
This is where the ego gets in the way and undermines
everything else. And it's the most subtle.
And so, because it's the most subtle, often it's the most
neglected. But as I say, it's also the most
powerful. And we know this, we know this
intuitively, as you just said, because you've had that direct
experience of when your mind sets off, everything's off
because it affects your message, it affects your delivery, it
affects your patience, There's subtle changes in your body
language and your expression. And people can read that because
people are good at reading people.
And you get the feeling this person doesn't care about me.
This person just cares about expressing their ideas this.
Their perception because I cannot recognize my own ego,
right? So they have the wrong
perception of me. Totally the opposite of what I
actually am trying to do. Hopefully help them see what I.
See. Correct.
So there's this, this process of
shedding that ego and saying, well, coming back to, well, what
is my intention here? What is my intention?
Is my intention that I want to come out of this feeling, oh,
that was a good intellectual fight.
Beat him, I showed him I whatever.
Is that my intention? I want to get one over the other
person, OK, that's one intention.
Is my intention. I want to let off steam.
Is my intention that I've. I want a free event.
Is my intention that I want to look intellectually superior in
front of my peers on Twitter? Is my intention that I want to
indulge a previous habit of exercising no impulse control?
So it's about getting honest with yourself.
What is my intention here? Always my intention that I would
like to adopt the stand of speaking to another person the
same way I would like to be spoken to.
Oh, OK, well, that's gonna require a different sort of
communication. So the mere process of asking
what's my intention? And this is something I do
repeatedly because as I say, my predilection for a long time has
been to get angry, to get exasperated.
Why doesn't this person get it? And I think particularly the
more you know about something, here's the irony, The more you
know about something, the bigger the risk that you come across as
a Dick head because you some of that exasperation and that
frustration comes across in the way you express.
And that's where you risk sounding superior.
And that's where you risk losing that humility that you realize
you don't know everything. The system's constantly
changing. Knowledge is changing.
You have gaps in your understanding.
Someone else might think of something.
You might become the the future incumbent.
And there's some other disruptor who has some knowledge asymmetry
that you didn't have that caused you to suddenly be the person
you were criticizing one year ago.
So. So that intellectual humility is
really important. And that process of remembering,
well, if I lose my humanity in the process and if I stop caring
about other humans, what have we really gained?
At the end of the day, didn't I say I came to Bitcoin because I
believe it was for the people and it could.
Yes, it's about sound money and yes, it's about through learning
about sound money. You learn about how societies
are messed up and you want to improve societies of people.
Well, you improve lives of people, one person at a time.
You don't fight your way into peace.
You don't aggression. You're you're way into love and
and you don't lose control your way into self-control.
So you you develop greater love, greater compassion and greater
self-control by practicing love, compassion and self-control on a
regular basis. Yeah, so reminding yourself of
those things makes a huge difference.
And so my approach is always being being.
I know a lot of people say, well look, you get 10 times the the,
the, the engagement on Twitter if you're negative or you're
progressive than if you're respectful.
I haven't found that to be the case.
If you look at, there's this wonderful example today.
OK, evidence points. So Elizabeth Warren, bless her
heart, lovely tweet she wrote about how Bitcoin is great for
money launderers. She's right.
Bitcoin is used by money, money launderers.
But again, that's a statistic out of context.
It turns out it's actually used way more.
The Fiat systems use ways more. Everyone understands it within
the Bitcoin ecosystem. And Pierre Rochelle wrote to her
a beautiful tweet he has. Elizabeth Warren has 6.3 million
followers. Pierre has I think 46,000, so
less than 1%. And he totally ratioed her with
respect. He didn't diss her, He didn't
say she was an idiot. He just pointed out that a one
of her own colleagues was using Fiat for money laundering.
And shouldn't you look closer to home question mark very
respectfully? So look you absolutely can.
With respect, with dignity, without putting the other person
down, without calling him an idiot.
I think you'll win more people over in the long term.
It may feel better in the short term, it may give the ego more
satisfaction in the short term. You may feel like I showed them,
but it's not going to win the respect of the masses, I don't
believe. And it's also, more importantly,
it's not going to orange peel anyone.
How many people have changed your minds when their mindset
was one of frustration When when you got this vibe that they
thought you're an idiot? Yeah.
When you felt that they felt they knew more than you and you
were going to show them or that you were gonna dominate them or
that you were going to your superior intellectual knowledge
was going to win the day. And your mission was just to
fill in the gaps and and their understanding so well, it
doesn't work, does it. And when someone comes with that
approach, you can tell. So all that has to be put,
whether it's true or not, has to be put to one side.
And getting back to these human basics of We're two humans.
We're in a room. We're forming a connection.
Let me understand how you see the world.
Let me understand how I can serve you, how I can help you in
some way, and maybe I can't. And I have to be prepared for
the eventuality. You might not be interested in
what I have to say. And that's fine.
In which case, I'll walk away. I won't waste my time on yours.
Yeah. So those are the four
components. So message, tactics, delivery
and mindset. But mindset is most important.
Yeah, I it's a bit confrontational for me.
I love, I love this. It's it's interesting that it's
like a double challenge, right? Because you know and you also
feel that she, I will honestly say what I replied.
I said, I replied bad losers. So that was my show.
Your honesty and look, here's the thing.
This is not about being a St. This is, this is about, and this
is an inconvenient video to watch if you if you don't want
to, if you want to, if you enjoy so much just venting or letting
off or whatever. You don't want to challenge
yourself. And the unfortunate thing about
watching this is you will challenge yourself and saying am
I really being faithful to my intentions?
Am I? What is my intention?
But but I believe that's a positive thing because one of
the most powerful questions we can ask us is what do I care
about most? What are my values?
What am I here to do? You know, you've done, out of
all the crazy things you could have done, the world you've
chosen to do what you do to, to do this podcast.
And you've done that for some reasons that you care about the
thing called Bitcoin really deeply.
You care about a particular community and you want to bring
knowledge to that community. You don't think we're being
served as well as they could have been without your presence,
not through ego, but just because it was true.
And so you create that gap for them.
And so it's out of service. And then from time to time, and
I'm the same, I do a lot of things.
So I want to serve a community that I don't think will be
served as well if it wasn't for me.
Not for ego, but simply because I see a gap and I want to fill
that gap. Yeah, it's honestly altruistic,
right? It's honestly altruistic.
Exactly. And now just because we have
that altruism, it doesn't mean that altruism reflects through
and every single atomic action we take, right?
We're going to be on a spectrum depending on whether it's a good
day or bad day. However, if we ask ourselves
that question, you know, what am I here to do?
What? Why am I doing it?
Why did I choose this path? Does this communication express
that intention? Just asking that question is
enough to go maybe I'll say this rather than that.
That's all we need. Yeah, that's all we need.
Yeah, 100%, man. I I thank you for showing me
this or just helping me think about this again.
Like, I I know how it works. It's more like, you know, with
Elizabeth Warren. It's just I'm so disappointed.
It's it's it's I'm so like Oh my God like are there people are
there really people like this out there right.
Like it's it's that frustration that I think like oh we have a
long way to go and this is only like 1 subject like Oh my God
you know like that is that that frustration is what makes me
tweet bad loser. I totally get it.
And it's nice because I feel lighter afterwards, right?
But you're totally agree it's not a long term thing and I love
that you connected that with this podcast 100%.
My whole goal with the podcast is I start this, I wanna help my
generation. Yeah, I don't care if I make
money or whatever. I have one goal, My first goal,
one goal is make 100 episodes and and I'll see what happens.
That's the whole that's the thing and nothing more than
that, right? And so I love that you connected
it because that's true. That's that's I.
Want to show you the status there, but on someone in
particular that really is is a great example of this.
And and I would say does this better than I do.
And that's Lynn Alden and a lot of the people I talk to about
Lenold and they respect two things about her.
One is her deep knowledge of incredibly deep knowledge of her
content and her incisive intellect and ability to speak
about it cohesively and concisely.
And secondly is the way that she communicates that information.
So there's what she says and there's she's how she sees it.
And both are equally important. And the reason that she was able
to do what she did with Alex Devries is if you watch that
video, not once does she attack him, not once does she say, you
know your statistic about this is wrong.
She doesn't take that tack at all.
She doesn't even talk about get into a debate with him.
She just looks at the abstract points and then adds a more
nuanced understanding than what he brings to the picture.
Yes, and it's brutal. It's brutally effective because
she doesn't get into a fight, she doesn't get into a debate,
She furthers a conversation and she adds the missing nuance with
respect for the other person. And the turn around was
absolutely phenomenal. And I think about that often,
because here's the thing, I know a lot of the ways that Alex de
Vries is using data, there are statistics that have been
debunked and there's things that are inaccurate, etcetera.
But I was ever in a conversation that would not be the right go
to, because then you just look like 2 politicians agreeing
point disagreeing point by point.
Yeah. Then you actually step into his
frame of correct, Correct how he's working.
Yeah, you cannot win a game from your side of halfway.
And that's the thing that a lot of the response of the Bitcoin
community has been very defensive.
And yes, there's there are some things that need to be defended
and that's important. But that's only half the
equation and that's why it's part of when I discovered that
Bitcoin was had the potential to be a tremendous net positive for
the environment, I said well, yes, there's some work to be
done to defend false claims. There's also some work to be
done and this is much more fun to tell the inspiring story that
hasn't yet been told. So yes, there's there's what you
say and there's how you say it and we have these examples And
and I say that because I believe Lynn Alden has as much impact
the course of who she is as a person and the standard that she
helps us to rise up to become as the education that she gives.
And and we all as leaders within the ecosystem have that same
capability where there's the knowledge we empower and the
education we give and the points we make.
And then there's who we're being, who we are.
And and that's as important, I would say even more important
because that has an even longer lasting legacy.
And I love that we talked about this.
This taught me a lot, actually. Like, I'm really thinking, OK,
like I I know. I am thinking about tweets that
I think where I tweeted more angrily, I'd say, and I think my
new outset is I'm going to, before I tweet that I'm going to
see, can I turn this around into a positive thing?
Because I absolutely, absolutely agree.
Yeah. So it's fascinating.
It's fascinating. Like, I'm fascinated by the
personal journey and challenge of understanding Bitcoin, which
is exactly this, you know. One of the greatest moments of
last year was I share the story and a tweet about a week ago was
a guy who wrote an article about 7 technologies that were green
and the Bitcoin. And these articles come up like
every two months someone will write one of them.
And you know, the first reaction is, oh, here we go again.
And the second reaction is, do I, do I really have to be the
guy who keeps on doing this again and again?
I'm sick of sick of having to do all these.
Why do I have to debunk all these articles, right?
I'd rather not be doing that. It's things I'd much rather be
doing than debunking these articles.
But I put that to one side. I put my frustration to one
side, and I asked myself the question, OK, how would I like
to be communicated to if I'd written that article?
And that caused me to write in a very different way.
Now, I still challenge the article because that article
needed to be challenged because contained some things which were
incorrect. But the way that I did it, the
mindset I was in when I did it was completely different.
And as a result of that, that opened up the possibility.
And here's the thing. It's not a probability, it's a
possibility. You can't control what the other
person does. You can be as respectful as you
want. The other person can still be
disrespectful back, but you increase the probability of
reciprocation when you, from your side, communicate the way
you want to be communicated to. And he wrote back and said,
actually, you raised some interesting points there, but
what about this and this and this?
And I'm like, haha, OK, now we're in a dialogue, not a
debate. I'm going to continue this.
So I just said, oh, that that's an interesting point.
Yes, you're right here. What about this And then this
and this? And he said, oh, actually, I
hadn't thought about this within about two or three exchanges.
He was like, actually, this looks really good.
And then I could not believe it. A week later, he wrote an
article about the positive environmental benefits of
Bitcoin. And I was like, Hallelujah, that
wasn't the outcome I was expecting.
That wasn't the reason I did it, but also reflect.
And that says more about him than it does about me and about
his virtues, because I know that not everyone responds that way.
But also it was partly because of the mindset I was in.
And I know that had I followed my first impulse, it would have
been impossible to respond that way.
Yeah, but this is also a great illustration of, you know, as I
said, bad loser. And I felt my ego was happy that
I did that right. That's a very small reward.
Yeah, well, you know, with Elizabeth Warren, the game is
not to get it to change your mind.
That's not the game. The game is an internal game.
It's an internal game about, you know, can I?
When it comes again, we become, as Aristotle said, what we
habitually do. So there will come a time when
you're talking to someone who's not an Elizabeth Warren, who
does have the capacity to change their mind.
And if you've been in the the habit of communicating in the
way that would encourage someone to do so, you'll be practiced.
It won't be a new thing you've suddenly got to do.
It'll be part of who you are. So it'll it'll be a genuine
rather than disingenuous. Yeah, now exactly.
So, So what I wanted to say is like you illustrate that if you
don't take the short little reward route, the longer route,
yeah, it takes a bit longer route which is maybe trading or
challenging. The reward is also a bit the
reward is so much bigger. Yeah, and longer because it
motivates you to keep continuing this, but also you influenced
someone else to challenge their themselves and then even create
some output that is a 180 from, you know, 1-4 weeks before.
And so I think that's that that that that should be emphasized
more. I love, I love that.
I think that's the mechanic, how it works, right?
Like the fact that you can accept that you have to struggle
before you can reap the rewards, right?
That is a universal thing in in in general, right?
For your personal development, Yeah, love that, yeah.
To wrap it up, I I asked the same question to everyone and
that's what is a core belief that you will never let go.
Oh man, you're in with a big one.
I believe that love will change the world.
Amazing. That's a great end.
Thanks so much for this conversation.
I really enjoyed it. And yeah, I I will link to all
the places where people can find you.
Your book obviously, and your writings on badcoins.com.
I love that. And yeah, thanks so much for
coming on minute. I hope to do this again
somewhere in the future. Thank you, Bram.
It's been a pleasure. Cheers.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, it would be amazing
if you could rate, review and subscribe on the podcast
platform of your choice. It will help us educate more
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You can follow and connect with me on Twitter.
I'm Brom K That's at BR AM K and if you are or know someone who
has an interesting perspective on Bitcoin that's worth sharing,
hit me up. I read and reply to every single
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hope you'll be here for the next episode.
Thanks for listening. Bye.