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hey scott welcome to the podcast thanks for having me on happy to be here and i’m not going to
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mispronounce your surname which you just told me offline beforehand so no i often just keep it to
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first names actually so that’s cool um okay so scott i’m going to start here very broad question
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what are you most excited about working on currently oh uh maybe two-part answer there
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I’m working on a second book
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my second book
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which has been keeping me really busy
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and you know
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I don’t consider myself an author
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it’s a hobby pet project thing
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but
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my evenings and weekends go there
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and I’m more than happy to
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so that should be ready
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for a release in early April
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is kind of like where I’m targeting
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really exciting
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it’s another Bitcoin book
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but quite a bit different
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than the Dow of Bitcoin, which I put out just about two years ago. And yeah. And then on the
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other side of my day of job, in my daily life, I’m plugging away at Block Rewards here. We build
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software trying to figure out new ways to pay people in Bitcoin. Awesome. Okay. So 700 different
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tangents we could potentially go in. But I’m glad that you mentioned writing books. I always try to,
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if someone I have on the podcast has written a book,
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I always try and read the whole thing
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before I speak to them and record a conversation.
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And I’m at like Kindle 92% of the Dow of Bitcoin.
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Like I’m so close, but I haven’t quite finished it.
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But I love when I come across a,
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and this is true with everyone,
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like everyone’s life is different.
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And we all stumble across this thing called Bitcoin
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and we have a different lens on it.
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And it’s like, ah,
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hadn’t thought about it from that perspective before.
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I had no idea that that field even existed as a form of theory or study or philosophy or life.
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And so Taoism, as I read your book, The Tao of Bitcoin, was something like, whoa, I actually realized in my lifetime I’ve given almost zero attention to this.
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So what I’d love to know is like, how did you even get into that in the first place?
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And you touched on it a little bit in the book, but there’ll be people listening that haven’t read it.
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So it’s just that came before Bitcoin.
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So it’s like, why was that even part of your life?
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Yeah, the origin story was a book that I was given.
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I played basketball growing up through all the way through university.
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And as the kind of levels of competition got higher and higher, the mental aspect of the
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game becomes more and more important.
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I was 20, 21, something like this.
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And yeah, just really at that point, I was really struggling in my basketball career,
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trying to sort of level out my performance and the psychological component of it.
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And a coach of mine gave me this book called The Tao of the Jump Shot,
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which is a book about Taoism and basketball.
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And it was a book I read a few times and kept a copy forever.
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It really introduced me to the broader subject.
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A few years later, I found myself living in China
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and had some really beautiful experiences there with Taoist culture.
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And then just kind of took up over the course of the next, I don’t know,
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10, 15 years between then and writing the book,
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reading books on the subject here and there.
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And the one that I talk about quite a bit in the book was
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Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life by Wayne Dyer.
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And I was a massive fan of Wayne Dyer.
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and of that book.
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And it’s kind of the book on the subject
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that I recommend to anybody who might be interested
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and looking for a really great primer or overview.
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They really are timeless lessons, right?
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It’s a way of viewing our part in the universe
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in a very, you know, a way that lets people
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let go of expectations and just try to participate with whatever’s happening in their circumstances
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or in the broader environment of the world we all move through as individuals.
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And I think that it was…
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So one thing I think that happens with Bitcoin is as people start to really think about it,
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you sort of understand it better. You relate it to your own kind of personal expertise or
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passionate, you know, passion areas. And, and for me, this was one of those. And I thought to myself,
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the more I learned about the subject, the more I thought, you know, there’s just, there’s just a
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lot here, you know, there’s a lot of like, great information around why Bitcoin works the way it
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does because of the, you know, um, data limit size on transactions and all of the, the technical
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components. And, uh, and equally, you know, there’s, there’s a lot to be said for, you know,
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sort of, uh, fundamental principles of, uh, why things work the way they do, which is really,
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which is really what a lot of DAO’s ideas are about, right? That there is sort of fundamental
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underlying principle that guides all things. And everything in the physical world is
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subject to the same rules and subject to this kind of universal law. And it makes sense to me that
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Bitcoin, like anything else, would be subject to those same rules.
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It makes me think about, I mean, we’ve all researched so much when it comes to Bitcoin, but
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Brandon Quinton wrote a great piece about the mycelium of Bitcoin and mapping Bitcoin as a thing of nature, essentially.
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Oh, that’s a cool way of thinking about it.
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And then, as you’re pointing out, it fits in very well with how Taoism is a part of life.
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to help people understand.
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Like for me, when I read some of this Taoist
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or start studying it and using your book
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as a way of doing that,
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it helps me feel much calmer
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because you’re immediately like,
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well, I’m in the situation I’m in.
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If I push too hard in a certain direction,
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then it’s just going to kind of,
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it’s not going to work like I expect it to.
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And it’s just more this sense of peace and calm
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about like the journey that you’re on.
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and that like you already touched on it’s it’s actually very helpful you’re like oh cool okay
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um can you think of a like you already mentioned basketball maybe that’s a good one but
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what is a good example of in your life when you’ve actually taken this
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it’s a philosophy essentially isn’t it like sort of life principles and applied it to a real world
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scenario and felt better yeah yeah i mean it’s every i’ve actually right wrote the book from a
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very real sense of that. I, you know, years and years later, I just unconsciously practice this
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in my life at all times. So this is how I live. So cool. Writing the book is pretty easy because I,
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I just kind of have adopted this. And I think this way about things and, you know, Bitcoin,
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this is true for me. And, and it’s, it’s an ironic thing about Bitcoin. I think that,
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you know and for many people it’s like it’s the life raft it is your reason for being optimistic
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about the future it is the thing that you know people can really like anchor on to for the hope
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of a brighter tomorrow and equally like there is people who you know bitcoin is the thing that
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keeps them up at night it is the thing that uh can’t it’s the pot that can’t boil fast enough
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right it’s the uh it’s the thing that just won’t go away yeah anxiety frustration you know peter
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schiff and it’s and it’s it’s it’s all of those things and it’s none of those things which is
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actually a another really kind of like taoist idea where what people are experiencing is an
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internal thing you know bitcoin doesn’t do anything it doesn’t it’s it’s neither the hope beacon or
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the source of frustration, right? These are something someone is kind of like unconsciously
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choosing to experience in a very personal way. And yeah, so I think these lessons were helpful
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for me with Bitcoin even, like as I was really learning how to interact with Bitcoin. You know,
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I think your first, you know, most people on their Bitcoin journey of having whatever meaningful
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portion of their own personal wealth stored in Bitcoin are kind of like going to experience a
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new set of emotions as they go through sort of the whatever’s happening with Bitcoin’s price
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could be that you bought just before it went up a lot and you get to experience like the ecstasy,
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the feeling smarter than everyone, greed, whatever. Great set of feelings.
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I know people who bought the top. There’s the same number of people who bought the bottom,
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bought the top. And then they had to then sit for a year or three years or whatever.
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It was crushing feeling of feeling like an idiot. This is the one time Bitcoin actually died. Now
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I’ve really screwed myself and my future. And, you know, it’s, uh, again, it’s, it’s just, it
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doesn’t behave in a way like the individual person doesn’t matter to Bitcoin. It’s a, it’s like this
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impartial, it’s a, it’s like a force of nature. And, and I think that, you know, so there’s some
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some of these ideas or the teachings, the tools are,
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does, you know, help people retain a certain perspective
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in the face of sort of like,
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whether things are going really great or bad,
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like it’s a little bit of like, you know,
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just sitting with yourself and you know,
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what’s really changed.
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You know, I talk about this in the book, like, you know,
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if you have a Bitcoin and it’s worth a hundred thousand
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or it’s worth 10,000.
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No, what has really changed?
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It’s like, you still have the Bitcoin.
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So what’s changed is your perception, your perspective,
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maybe your ability to sell that Bitcoin
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and buy other stuff with it.
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You know, it’s not entirely nothing,
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but a lot of these things are self-imposed.
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And yeah, so Daoism I think is, has been for me,
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like an invaluable toolkit
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for all of the different challenges you meet in life.
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and creating perspective and staying grounded
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and just thinking about the bigger picture.
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There was a section in your book
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where you touched briefly on
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what must have been your fiat career.
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And I think you were talking about doing
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enterprise software sales or something like that.
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Forgive me, I don’t remember exactly.
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But the reason it struck me was the idea
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of being a sales-focused or performance-focused position.
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and I used to be a broker for many years in the shipping industry.
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And when you hammer it too hard, you get burnt out.
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It’s super simple.
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And all you’re trying to do is beat the guy in the high-rise tower
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across the road, really, like all yourself.
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And the idea that you were able to fulfill that job
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with a kind of Taoist lens of like just basically
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just not pushing crazy hard and allowing other people to come to you
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and you’re probably very very effective at that um and it’s a really almost contrarian insight to
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what the default position is in someone at least if i was to use my experience it’s like it’s
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basically the faster and the harder you go the more you win and in my experience when i looked
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20 years ahead of me i was like i don’t want to be that guy um and i left and i took a different
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route but um how did that i mean did that make a big difference essentially when you’re and even
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now when you’re building your business, like how you approach
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everyday decisions, how you’re dealing with customers, they’re
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dealing with suppliers, it must affect everything. And it’s
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fascinating to think through.
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Yeah, totally. And I think that those that that particular lesson
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was really the one that I became most familiar with when I was
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playing basketball, and sport was a great study of like, you
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know, when you’re trying too hard.
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You know, when you’re really, you just don’t hit it properly.
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You just can’t.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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You have to let the game come to you, you know, whatever the game is.
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Right.
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And, you know, and I think any, you know, business is the same and the reverse is true.
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Right.
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It’s not only about sitting around doing nothing and trying to let things come to you.
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And that’s a great recipe for failure.
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But, you know, it’s the same recipe as trying too hard.
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You know, the harder you try, sometimes the worse you can make things.
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Right.
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I think that, so yeah, I think that, you know, how I approach things in general is always kind of the same.
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And it has to do with sort of that, you know, middle path perspective.
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The idea of trying to thread the needle of the right amount of doing and non-doing.
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And it’s just as true in Bitcoin, right?
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People, you know, want to, you know, trade their way to more Bitcoin.
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They want to you know or somebody buys a Bitcoin wallet and then doesn look at it for eight years and they throw their hard drive in the landfill and then they you know so there somewhere in the middle is the right amount of like you know doing and not doing and
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these things this is the thing i think is like all these different lessons have endured for so long
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because they’re just as relevant now as they were you know 3 000 years ago it’s there’s
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There’s certain aspects of the human condition that never really change.
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And I think it’s why they’re so cool.
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And that’s a great segue into asking more of a historical context.
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So for someone out there that hasn’t ever even heard of Taoism, where does it come from?
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How did it start and evolve into today?
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yeah it’s a it’s a it’s a manuscript the original you know daoist teachings were a manuscript of 81
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verbs uh proverbs that uh came out of the uh warring states period in early um china something
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like 4th century 7th century bc depending on the the record keeping of it and the story goes that
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Lao Tzu, who is credited as being the author, was a sort of disillusioned with the state of China at the time and was on his way to adventure into exile.
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And just before he left the country, he sort of wrote this as a parting gift.
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And the name Lao Tzu, it means old master.
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you know, it’s kind of like Santa Claus or it’s possible this person was not an actual person.
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One thing that I, you know, think is interesting about the origins of Taoism, you know, there’s a
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few things I talk about this in the book. You know, there’s sort of an overlap of this
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mythical figure that is behind the origin of the idea. And, you know, the Satoshi story is
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It’s kind of a modern day version of that tale.
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And actually the Tao Te Ching, the original Taoist treatise, was in large part a response to a dissatisfaction with governance in the time.
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And which is awesome.
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It’s an amazing parallel, isn’t it?
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Yeah, totally.
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Yeah, Chancellor on the Brink.
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and uh you know like a bigger idea in daoism is kind of this concept i talk in the book about
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uh reversionism and things kind of have a way of returning to the natural order of the way they’re
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supposed to be and i think that bitcoin is and i i talk about this in the book i think that in
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bitcoin is almost like an immunological response this is a natural course correction for uh a
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financial system that has just kind of like gone horribly awry over, you know, the period of
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every year or so. Yeah. Yeah. And but it strikes, sorry, Scott, I’ve got too many things in my mind
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here. It strikes me that it’s not just a financial system, though, is it? Because the closer you get
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to looking at this thing, you realize that the ability to print money like is available today,
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it gets into education it gets into media it gets into health care it’s like the entire thing has
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been warped into these centralized um systems which are not necessarily benefiting the end user
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and that should ultimately end up in reversion like nature is so decentralized going back to
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that mycelium article it’s a good example of it but i love that article by the way yeah it’s great
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but even like some things I’m I’m thinking through at the moment with like homeschooling
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it’s like well education used to be decentralized like how does a tribe work well it’s not chatting
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to the tribe next door figuring out how they want all their children to think it’s doing it on their
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own and equally like the family itself is a decentralized unit from the rest of the tribe
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and yeah wow it’s it’s everywhere in that sense and so so why was it important do you think for
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the longevity of Taoist ideas that Lao Tzu was a mythical figure. Like it’s almost important
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because you can’t kill them or you can’t see their mistakes or their failures because that also is
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reversion to some extent I guess. You’ve got to get it wrong to get back to reversion.
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Yeah you know I think the same is true for Satoshi and it’s important that we never know
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who Satoshi is, um, for the same reason. And it’s, you know, it’s an idea, but if there’s a
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real person attached to it, it’s an invention and that invention requires credit and that credit
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attaches itself to the person and, uh, you know, and people who are flawed, right? Like there’s
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just so I think that yeah in these cases it’s like it’s just as true for Bitcoin it doesn’t matter
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you know if it was the NSA or if it was Jack Dorsey or you know whoever it was uh it’s immaterial
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and I think that as time goes on it actually matters less and you get thousands of years
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like Lao Tzu and it really doesn’t matter you know the wisdom is beneficial for people all of
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the same. And even if we did know who he was, we wouldn’t know
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enough about it now for it to be meaningful. Anyways. So yeah, I
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think, you know, retaining the ideas in the purest form is what
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keeps them potent and, you know, keeps the signal clear.
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And I then I really like asking this. So we are an amalgamation of
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our choices. Like this moment right now is the result of
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everything we’ve ever done in our life. And when you came across Taoism, you were looking at
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something and you got value from it and you applied it to your own life. And that is, generally
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speaking, how we do everything. You’re like, oh, that’s kind of cool. I’ll take some of that. Oh,
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that’s kind of cool. I’ll take some of that. And you are a combination of all these things.
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Do you think there’s a, or do you now have a lens upon the world with which you make decisions as a
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result. And so how do we pick and choose like where to put our attention or do you know what
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I mean? I’d love to know how you kind of think through opportunities perhaps or equally like
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when you look at failures in hindsight. Yeah, I mean, I think some things that really stand true
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for me as universal that have just become a big part of who I am are approach to conflict would
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be one for sure. And, and I talk about this notion in the book and, um, you know, talking
0:21:09
about Jason Lowery’s, uh, software with Bitcoin and, you know, the, that same reversion principle
0:21:15
sort of teaches that, you know, the, the fastest way to, to get, find yourself in fights is to pick
0:21:22
fights and and uh yeah so so i i tend to uh you know i tend to think of you know stress scenarios
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uh i i treat them with this principle of sort of um non-action you know and waiting to see how
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things unfold i’m i’m not usually the person who leaps first uh and and that’s been that’s been
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something that has been i would say like pretty pretty steady in my life for the last however
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since however long ago i got that book 25 years and um the relationship with the present moment
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is the other one so i just a massive part of the teaching i think is our the the way that life has
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evolved in the modern world is really designed to steal our attention and that’s what consumerism
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society depends on you know we need to feel inadequate about things we don’t have so we can
0:22:29
think forwards about things that we want so you know we’re motivated to buy those things
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to pursue them to feel like uh we’re not good enough if we don’t have them and that
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that distracts us, you know, propelling us forward, you know, and, and the, that same
0:22:49
architecture, you know, leaves us looking backwards at decisions we’ve made and where we,
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where we’re, where we are now, you know, and like, um, you know, so we’re kind of like
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threading this space between paralyzing anxiety about the future and and regret about how things
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have gone up to this point and with whatever’s left we can um really you know enjoy what’s
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happening for us in the immediate now and i you know a great example of this is like you go to a
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restaurant and you see tables of friends sitting together and everyone is on their phone like
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They’re not actually talking to each other.
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They’re scrolling for dopamine hits and looking at pictures of other people doing something that they think is more exciting than the thing that they are doing.
0:23:43
Right.
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And this is it’s like an epidemic right now.
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It’s just the way the world works.
0:23:50
And so a lot of the different passages that I chose to put in the book, you know, and this is actually what I think is the most important lesson about Bitcoin and Taoism is that Bitcoin can be, I think, a very powerful way to remove yourself from that chronic, you know, thinking about things that are already passed or have not yet come to pass.
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and the most enjoyable experiences that we have are the ones where we are just fully present in
0:24:27
the moment we’re doing something you enjoy you’re with people you love you’re you know somewhere
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you’ve always wanted to go you know that’s really what life is right and life happens
0:24:38
in the now and you know our financial system this is like the real you know like what you
0:24:45
were talking about earlier about how it, you know, cross pollinates and creates problems in all these
0:24:51
different systems. Like ultimately it’s a time problem because, you know, the invention of interest
0:24:59
was a temporal transaction, right? Interest, uh, sends value through time and it, um, penalizes
0:25:10
those without assets and it lets asset rich people sorry i unplugged my mic there you’re
0:25:15
gonna have to uh don’t stress you hear me okay yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah so you’re on a
0:25:21
great you’re on a great run you talk about interest yeah the the invention of interest um
0:25:26
really transfers time from the asset poor to the asset rich right it monetizes time
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and it prices time there’s a great book i just finished reading called the price of time by
0:25:38
Edward Chancellor, which is definitely worth a read on the subject.
0:25:44
And, you know, when we start to monetize time and treat it like a commodity, you know, we have a finite amount of it.
0:25:53
And we all do, or most of us in some way or form, trade our time and we monetize our time.
0:26:01
when you start to think about money fiat money that devalues intentionally by design
0:26:13
and what that mechanism really does is it devalues the time that you have to trade for that
0:26:22
fiat money and that process really creates a scarcity of time you know we can never
0:26:31
really have enough time and um what i think people experience in the fiat world is a sort of like
0:26:40
ambient anxiety it’s a paralyzing feeling of like you know this is what the rat race is it’s
0:26:47
it’s impossible to get ahead because you know we’re all kind of like literally running out of
0:26:53
time as we each of us marches towards our expiry date none of us know when that is
0:26:59
um but you know in on top of that we have to deal with this you know artificial and externally
0:27:09
imposed problem that the unit of you know financial time is being eroded out from underneath us
0:27:17
and so i think this is why uh you know so many people in society feel this
0:27:26
struggle that gets kind of manifested in all these different ways. But the simplest way of
0:27:32
thinking about it to me is the decreased amount of actual time we can spend in the present moment,
0:27:40
you know, where, where things kind of slow down and you can really,
0:27:46
yeah, really, really just savor things. And so, yeah, to me, it’s, it’s a problem with the price
0:27:53
of time And this is how the most important relationship that Bitcoin and Taoism have is that you know I think properly understood because Bitcoin effectively solves that problem of melting money It it kind of you know solves the problem of
0:28:16
the theft of your time. And if you really have settled in on understanding what the end of the
0:28:25
theft of your time might mean for you, then I mean, for me, it means I spend almost no time now
0:28:34
worrying about my financial future. Like, so any moments that I would have previously allocated to
0:28:42
solving that problem in my mind, I just don’t do that anymore. So that’s now surplus. I get to have
0:28:48
that back. And the same can be said for things, you know, analyzing, you know, I think everybody
0:28:55
has their moment of like, why didn’t I buy Bitcoin when it was $500? Because I had a friend,
0:29:01
everyone has a friend who told them to buy it earlier, and they didn’t pay attention. And,
0:29:07
you know, like, we all have this story. And eventually, you can let that go, right? And
0:29:11
doesn’t matter the important thing is that you know this is a tool that has solved this critical
0:29:20
problem the theft of your time and i i ultimately think you know time is the most important thing
0:29:27
because what do people really actually try to do with money mostly uh in and buy them time
0:29:34
buy them time it looks different for everybody every consumer of time right um but but what
0:29:41
people are really I think for the most part shooting for is autonomy over their of their own
0:29:48
time oh Scott I love it amazing breakdown and so much of it feels brilliant but to push back for
0:29:58
one moment and forgive me for making this about myself but it’s just so real right now um two
0:30:06
things one my wife and I it’s the start of the new year we really think about like what what do
0:30:10
we want. And one thing that we find ourselves doing all the time is being on our phones around
0:30:17
our children, like all the time. And it’s not just because your phone’s an entertainment tool.
0:30:22
It’s also a transport tool. It’s also a shopping tool. It’s also an education tool. It’s an illness
0:30:27
tool. It’s a tool for everything. So, you know, the child hurts itself, you’re on your phone trying
0:30:32
to figure it out. Those are kind of unavoidable, but equally, we’re trying to homeschool. And so
0:30:37
we’ve got a long list of like administrative tasks to be done. And you find yourself doing the to do
0:30:41
list at the same time as when you really, you should be interacting with your child. You’re
0:30:45
like, Oh, my gosh, what are we doing? Literally, what are we doing? And our phone has gone from
0:30:50
being a tool that we can use to something that’s using us. And we’re really going to try hard to
0:30:57
figure out like, well, what are the parenting responsibilities? And how do we dovetail between
0:31:01
each other to like not be in that position? And because we feel like our time is being stolen.
0:31:07
To your point. And the other is this really difficult thing that’s hard to shake, which is,
0:31:13
and I’ve said this before in the past, it’s like, what if Bitcoin solves the wealth problem?
0:31:17
You don’t need physical real estate to pass to your kids. You don’t need a company to pass to
0:31:21
your kids. You don’t need gold. You just need to keep this stuff in self-custody. If you have five
0:31:27
kids, you split it five ways. If you split just one, whatever, it solves the inheritance problem,
0:31:31
which is essentially every single family I know has the same headaches around like who gets what
0:31:37
and someone’s upset and someone’s not.
0:31:40
But it’s still so hard to live,
0:31:43
to actually be like,
0:31:44
oh, I’ve solved the wealth problem.
0:31:47
What do you mean?
0:31:48
This is an ancestrally inherited issue
0:31:51
from father to son, father to son,
0:31:53
for generations of like,
0:31:54
you’ve got to go do this shit,
0:31:56
otherwise you’re fucked.
0:31:57
And I’ve personally made lots of different decisions
0:32:00
to my father and doing something very different
0:32:02
because I do believe Bitcoin can do that.
0:32:05
But actually embodying that,
0:32:07
It’s really hard.
0:32:08
And especially when I look at my numbers on the spreadsheet just posted a couple of days ago,
0:32:13
net assets 45% down in Australian dollars terms today to 12 months ago.
0:32:18
So 12 months ago, talk about that set of emotions.
0:32:23
I was like, I’ve just beaten hedge funds.
0:32:25
So see you guys.
0:32:26
And I was like pumped.
0:32:28
And a year later, I’m like, huh, that’s not such a great thing to read, right?
0:32:32
And I call myself an investor having been looking after an inheritance for 10 years.
0:32:37
it’s it’s really hard to actually be like no no i’m sorted it’s okay do you know what i mean
0:32:43
because you’re trying to throw off that that conditioning so have you found an effective way
0:32:48
of doing that perhaps this is what the daoism part really plays so well and it’s like actually
0:32:53
just relax mate you know yeah totally you know and yes uh i think but you know we’re all still
0:33:02
people right so it’s not like i um and i it would be insincere to give the impression that i’m
0:33:10
gonna i’m unaffected by this too uh it’s uh guru scott right no man i absolutely have the same
0:33:20
sort of like you know hopes and desires and and that’s where i think that the teachings are
0:33:25
valuable and like that book i mentioned wayne dyer’s change your thoughts change your life
0:33:29
Yeah, that’s all my, I’ve probably read that book 30 times.
0:33:33
Really? Oh, wow. Wow.
0:33:35
You know, and because you’re still the same person, you know, you know,
0:33:39
it’s just like people who read the Bible over and over. And, you know,
0:33:44
there’s just, I think there’s always new things,
0:33:48
new kernels of wisdom and there are old things you can get back in touch with.
0:33:53
And ultimately, you know, like we’re all on this individual journey and,
0:33:58
And again, like you’re so you’re on this like down 45%.
0:34:04
I mean, that’s a really personal thing that relates to getting in and getting out of something
0:34:10
or like, you know, it’s just like a starting point and it’s all relative.
0:34:15
You know, the person who got started buying their Bitcoin in 2013 probably doesn’t care,
0:34:23
you know, to the near to the same extent that you do.
0:34:28
It’s interesting, isn’t it?
0:34:30
Just the different evolutions that you go through, and each is an opportunity to grow
0:34:36
and to learn.
0:34:37
So how you actually apply, because information, and especially now with the ability of some
0:34:43
of these AI tools, like information isn’t the problem.
0:34:47
You can find anything you need.
0:34:49
The difficulty is the wisdom, or even the IP, that you’ve got to put all these different
0:34:55
pieces together.
0:34:57
that’s the hard bit and so whatever tools get created in the future it’s still going to be that
0:35:01
same problem of like well you can you’ve got all this stuff what do you do with it and i think
0:35:07
that’s where some of this mindset personal development spiritual work is needed because
0:35:13
you don’t know how to put it all together um and equally why i find value in podcasts um scott i’m
0:35:21
intrigued to just to move slightly forwards then so you’re releasing another book um how much or
0:35:26
how little of the future book would you like to share?
0:35:31
Yeah, maybe not a ton just yet.
0:35:33
Okay.
0:35:35
Yeah, it really is entirely the discussion about time.
0:35:40
And I would say, you know, I am a huge fan of Gigi’s Bitcoin is Time.
0:35:46
Yeah, great article, yeah.
0:35:47
Yeah, it was a great piece of writing.
0:35:50
And yeah, I’m kind of like exploring some of those ideas
0:35:55
and trying to take them a little bit further.
0:35:58
And hopefully what this will be
0:35:59
is a very different kind of Bitcoin book.
0:36:02
You know, I think there’s been so many great books
0:36:05
written on, you know, macroeconomics and hard money
0:36:08
and all these other things.
0:36:11
This one will be definitely more of a spiritual successor
0:36:18
to sort of what Gigi started, I think,
0:36:22
with Bitcoin’s time.
0:36:24
Cool.
0:36:25
What I really like is this idea of, it’s kind of like, you know, when the student is ready,
0:36:32
the teacher appears, this idea of consciousness and information being accessible at certain
0:36:39
vibrations. And, you know, when it comes to authoring books, you already mentioned,
0:36:43
it’s more of a hobby than necessarily anything else. But it’s still very much a case,
0:36:47
regardless if you’re like monetizing it, quote, unquote, but the, you have to be at a certain
0:36:53
place for that thing to become reality um so have you noticed over the years then that
0:37:01
if you push too hard to use that daoist framework like the book just doesn’t happen
0:37:06
so you’ve actually just got to let it sit for a bit and at some point it’ll be ready um is or is
0:37:14
there much more of a like meticulous process of like i’ve got this idea okay this is how it’s
0:37:18
going to happen it’s a funny that’s a really funny thing for you to ask I never plan on writing a
0:37:25
second book and had been just noodling on you know different ideas things that I started wanting to
0:37:33
you know talk about on podcasts more often and I was at a conference in October and uh ran into
0:37:43
somebody I know there and she asked me, you know, when are you, when are you going to write this
0:37:48
book on time? And, uh, when she said that it was just sort of like, I’ll do it now.
0:37:56
I got back home, you know, after the event and, and started writing and, uh, really cool. Yeah.
0:38:03
So I guess these things just have a way of, uh, happening when they’re meant to. And, you know,
0:38:09
six months ago, I would, I would be surprised to hear that this is where I am now. Like it’s,
0:38:15
I’m kind of, um, it’s quite a, it’s quite a bigger book. Dow of Bitcoin was about 50,000 words
0:38:21
and I’m already at 110,000 on the manuscript for this one. So it’s, it’s quite a bit of a deeper
0:38:29
dive and, uh, yeah. Really cool. So, so, and one more question on books, because it’s something
0:38:37
that I’ve toyed with and I’ve just never, I’ve never found to kind of summarize this in a sense,
0:38:44
never actually sat down and done it. I’ve got a manuscript for a book that I wrote a year ago,
0:38:49
but never edited and never did anything with. And I guess I just wasn’t ready.
0:38:56
To any aspiring authors out there, what would be the number one thing that you’ve learned from
0:39:01
doing this? Oh, good question. You know, I think it’s like, it’s, again, I would probably say two
0:39:11
things. One, you know, I gained a lot of insight and value from hiring people to work on the book
0:39:18
with me, you know, like professional editors. And so like really kind of honoring the process. And
0:39:26
yeah, I enjoyed the end to end of it and got an immense amount of satisfaction, you know,
0:39:36
when other people ultimately end up reading it and some enjoying it. And, you know, I think the
0:39:43
other thing is that it can be scary to really hang yourself out if they’re, you know, you think
0:39:50
they’re your ideas to whatever extent that’s possible. And, you know, the act of like, then,
0:39:59
you know, putting them out there for anyone else to like or dislike and the internet can be a harsh
0:40:05
place of faceless critics. And, and that’s good. You know, like I, you know, now I, I’m glad that I,
0:40:15
that I kind of like took action on that and um I’m excited to get this next one out and see what
0:40:22
people think of it really cool and I like that phrase take action or get action or or because
0:40:30
this is again this is time it’s like your this came up in a podcast recently with Rev Hoddle
0:40:36
um I don’t know if you know Rev permaculture focus guy on on Nostra I had on he’s awesome
0:40:41
but just talking about stacking capital and he has these different forms of capital that he’s
0:40:47
working on it’s like how can i do two or three or four of them at the same time because time is a
0:40:54
flow and even when you sleep you’re spending your time and so how do we figure out the roi for our
0:41:03
time in the most effective way and writing a book is something that just to some people might not be
0:41:10
an effective ROI. It just is not worth it. But all the lists of reasons you just mentioned is
0:41:14
actually that was worth it for your time. And I guess it’s that it’s like, what do you get out of
0:41:21
it rather than because that’s a funny process of design, isn’t it? It’s like, build it and they will
0:41:26
come do extraordinary amounts of deep market research to know you’re solving someone’s acute
0:41:31
problem. And it’s probably somewhere in the middle is actually the way to go. But yeah, how you decide
0:41:38
to spend your time every day is such a difficult thing to figure out um and scott okay so what i’d
0:41:43
love to ask about now is is block rewards and so it’s your business that you’re building um how’s
0:41:49
that going what’s the um the history with that and i’m always intrigued as to like how people
0:41:56
are actually making money in and around bitcoin because it not always very easy yeah It a really tricky thing about building the world the Bitcoin world of tomorrow today
0:42:15
Between the hyper-Bitcoinized world, I want to hopefully be alive to see.
0:42:22
And today, there’s a bunch of infrastructure and bridges that need to get built.
0:42:25
and I think the reality is that in the world of today,
0:42:32
the Bitcoin world of today,
0:42:35
Bitcoin businesses are really tricky.
0:42:37
We’re still super early
0:42:39
and the general person isn’t looking to pay for their Starbucks with Bitcoin.
0:42:49
I think there’s a great argument.
0:42:51
we’re still sort of like firmly in this store of value phase of the monetization of Bitcoin as an
0:42:58
asset. Yeah. And how long it takes is anybody’s guess. So, I mean, the short answer to your
0:43:10
question is our business is a SaaS company. So we have incentive and rewards products that
0:43:19
uh kind of build the same way um you know companies have been using tools like this for a long time
0:43:26
it’s just that ours are the first ones that you know create a reward for an employee that’s bitcoin
0:43:33
instead of uh you know some other thing and and for that uh tool we we charge dollars and so
0:43:41
So, but it’s tricky.
0:43:45
You know, it’s really tricky.
0:43:46
I think that as much as we, when you see Bitcoin and it feels so obvious, that’s the other
0:43:57
piece I think that is really still super early.
0:44:00
Like it’s actually not obvious for almost everybody.
0:44:03
No, no, it’s hard.
0:44:04
It’s very hard.
0:44:06
Yeah.
0:44:06
And it’s very niche.
0:44:07
and 100,000 or 100 million,
0:44:11
however many people really get it,
0:44:13
I think the number is a lot smaller,
0:44:16
actually, than we think it is.
0:44:19
I love that question.
0:44:21
Where are we actually at in adoption?
0:44:23
It’s really like some people will tell you,
0:44:25
we’re already there.
0:44:26
It’s like, no.
0:44:27
Really?
0:44:29
Yeah.
0:44:30
Certainly in my day life,
0:44:32
we’ve spoken about a bit,
0:44:34
you tune out of all the noise.
0:44:35
and when I ask people and I’m talking to people about Bitcoin every single day,
0:44:40
whether there’s someone in a cab, whether there’s someone helping you clean something,
0:44:44
whether it’s someone who’s another parent or whatever,
0:44:47
and most of the time they don’t really know what you’re talking about.
0:44:52
Yeah.
0:44:53
You know, they’ve heard the name.
0:44:54
Oh, is that still a thing?
0:44:56
Oh, right.
0:44:57
Oh, I used to buy pills with that like years ago.
0:45:01
Sweet.
0:45:01
Yeah, good times.
0:45:02
But it’s a big thing.
0:45:05
and they just don’t even really know um but that’s very anecdotal and you see other people
0:45:11
talking about address sizes and how many active wallets there are and blah blah blah um it’s very
0:45:18
hard to know isn’t it so you reckon we’re much much much smaller in terms of meaningful adoption
0:45:24
than what others would suggest yeah i i do think and i think i’m with you there yeah i i think it
0:45:31
will change quickly. Um, you know, I think about, and I tell this story a lot. I’m 45.
0:45:38
When I was just finishing high school, that was kind of like the early normalization of email. So
0:45:46
I started college and got my first email address and never checked it, you know, didn’t have the
0:45:53
habit of it. Nobody was really using email. It was like, this was the late nineties. And, um,
0:45:59
by the time I was graduated and in the workforce, it was impossible to have a job or a business
0:46:07
without email, you know, and that’s what, that’s what gradually and then suddenly looks like,
0:46:13
right. Where like, and so call that sort of five years, seven years, whatever it went from being,
0:46:19
you know, pretty at pretty niche to mandatory. And yeah, I think there’s, there’s a lot of
0:46:26
reasons to think you know money printing can go on for a long time i think we’ll be
0:46:32
using government money for a long time but i think that the problem of devaluing money is
0:46:40
you’re talking about you know states of consciousness um this is this is an idea
0:46:48
independent of bitcoin that is really i think undergoing a mass proliferation right now like
0:46:55
it doesn’t matter where you live uh things are a lot more expensive than they used to be
0:47:01
noticeably life is harder and we you know are getting conditioned to want or have less than
0:47:09
we used to have and that combination of forces i think is a for a lot of people that’s going to be
0:47:16
enough to start wondering what alternate solutions might be out there.
0:47:24
And, uh, yeah, I think, you know, at some point people realize it’s Bitcoin might make
0:47:30
you rich, but it’s not about getting rich.
0:47:32
It’s about, you know, solving this time problem and protecting what you actually already have.
0:47:39
And that’s, you know, when you, when you have like, you know, email is cool.
0:47:44
It made communicating people a lot easier.
0:47:48
But we’re really talking about like a fundamental human rights issue, right?
0:47:54
This is a basic component of, you know, healthy civilization of, you know, people being able to be sane and plan for the future with certainty.
0:48:08
and this is a solution that for a problem that everybody is facing everywhere so
0:48:15
of course people are going to adopt it you know it’s it’s just uh
0:48:20
yeah i think it’ll look a lot different when when when it does so i i think we you know
0:48:26
i think we’re earlier than we think but i i also actually am a crazy price bull and i think we’re
0:48:33
at like 10 million a coin by 2030.
0:48:36
Wow.
0:48:37
Yeah, and if it really…
0:48:40
Yeah, wow, so many comments to that.
0:48:42
I think it’s just this concept of time
0:48:44
is so underplayed, frankly.
0:48:49
I could have jumped on the price tag there,
0:48:52
and in some ways that’s where I immediately went,
0:48:53
but it’s not about getting rich.
0:48:58
But what you realize is your wealth
0:49:00
isn’t the dollar number.
0:49:02
The wealth is your time. And so actually, if you have more options in your life, i.e., I choose to homeschool my kids, that wouldn’t be possible if I was very much still in that broking world that I used to live in and on a fiat standard.
0:49:17
That’s wealth. That’s not on the fucking spreadsheet. You can’t see that, right?
0:49:22
I talked through the three key forms of capital, humanistic, intellectual, and financial.
0:49:27
And this is a typical humanistic area where your relationships, your kids, your network, that isn’t a dollar figure.
0:49:36
It’s impossible to put a number on.
0:49:37
But it’s a huge driver of value in your life, in your family, in your potential legacy, if that was a word you wanted to put on it.
0:49:47
Yeah, it’s so interesting.
0:49:48
And just to roll back to that, to block rewards, what was the genesis for the business, Scott?
0:49:54
And I love that I always like, sorry, excuse me, I’ll finish quickly.
0:49:59
I love seeing situations where there’s not necessarily business model risk because it’s an existing market that you know people understand the thing.
0:50:11
You’re just recreating it somewhere else.
0:50:13
Kind of like when you see a good hot dog in one country and you take it to another country, right?
0:50:17
You know someone else is buying it somewhere.
0:50:19
So as an entrepreneur, there’s not as much risk in that area of the business, but you
0:50:24
still have to focus on getting things right, of course.
0:50:27
What was the starting point you came from?
0:50:30
Yeah, so it wasn’t software sales.
0:50:31
I did 15 years in pensions and health benefits consulting.
0:50:37
So I was deeply in that world when I started studying Bitcoin.
0:50:43
I was in the class of 2020.
0:50:45
money. And at the time I was managing a number of pensions as a consultant and the Canadian
0:50:52
government started printing money like they did that year. I started studying inflation and money
0:51:00
printing and became, I thought things would happen faster than they did, but I was really worried
0:51:06
about fixed income and the 60, 40 portfolio, sort of all these instruments that had underpinned all
0:51:14
the products I had been selling my entire career.
0:51:19
And the light bulb went on for me with Bitcoin.
0:51:22
And I thought, everybody’s going to want to earn Bitcoin.
0:51:27
The easiest way to stack is earning Bitcoin instead of earning dollars.
0:51:31
And so what happened for me is what I think happens a lot of people.
0:51:37
If I was a shoemaker and I understood Bitcoin, I would be thinking about ways to
0:51:44
incorporated that into my business. It’s just like you said, the hot dog analogy.
0:51:51
What I think we’ll see over the next 10 and 30 years, whatever, is just a Bitcoin way of doing
0:51:58
all the useful things that we’re doing now. Everything can’t be ported over to the Bitcoin
0:52:05
world because I think a lot of it won’t be necessary in the same way. But I believe that
0:52:11
that people are still going to be paid, people will still be working. Um, and so to me, uh,
0:52:18
yeah, it was just, it was just that I happened to come from a background of a world of kind of
0:52:22
compensation and rewards. So when I understood Bitcoin, I’m thinking like, oh man, there’s going
0:52:27
to be a lot of opportunity to do some cool stuff here with creating new ways to help people
0:52:32
understand, you know, why they want to trade their time, you know, and this just happened when the,
0:52:38
uh 21 um jack mallard’s uh going public in december they had the great billboard in times square that
0:52:47
said something like no man should work for what someone else can print you know and i think that
0:52:54
it just is a massive application for bitcoin is getting people off of working for paper
0:53:01
when you could be working and trading your finite time for finite money
0:53:05
yeah true that oh my gosh the the 2020 story resonates because i mean i first bought bitcoin
0:53:14
2015 but i didn’t truly know what it was for a long time and sold some to go on holiday sold
0:53:22
some more because i thought 2017 block size wars is going to kill the whole thing and suddenly 2020
0:53:27
comes around and a stock listed company micro strategy sailors buying it and i’m like hang on
0:53:34
a second what’s going on over here and that’s what I’d probably call myself as well then the
0:53:38
class of 2020 in that sense that was the moment where I was like hang on a second what have you
0:53:43
owned for like five years I’m like this is the best performing asset you’ve ever had it just
0:53:47
sat in self-custody there’s no one like getting pissed off about a shower because you have an
0:53:51
investment property there’s no discretionary manager in between he’s like here’s a portfolio
0:53:55
of crap that you don’t even know what it is it’s just you in self-custody and you’ve beaten
0:53:59
everything else and they’re buying it in a stock listed company what the hell is this thing and
0:54:03
And that’s what kind of kicked it off.
0:54:05
And I guess just to reflect on if we were both the class of 2020 and we now are on a Bitcoin standard, applying different lessons from our life to this thing, building a business in your case or running podcasts, like that trajectory is probably going to map onto other people that are like the class of 25 or the class of 26 or the class of 20.
0:54:26
Do you know what I mean?
0:54:26
It’s fascinating to think how viral adoption works like that.
0:54:30
And absolutely, to your point, all those people want to get paid in Bitcoin.
0:54:35
And probably more than likely keep as much of it as possible.
0:54:38
And that’s what I love, thinking about your habits and how your spending changes.
0:54:43
You start to buy stuff that you actually need, not what you want.
0:54:48
And everything changes, doesn’t it?
0:54:50
Gosh.
0:54:51
Well, Scott, listen, so an hour has flown by.
0:54:53
Thank you so much for your time today.
0:54:56
Just to hand it over to you, is there anything else that you haven’t touched on that you’d like to mention?
0:54:59
and equally if people wanted to get in touch what was the best way to do that
0:55:03
yeah and thank you for having me on it’s uh it’s been a pleasure i i’m on twitter uh and on um
0:55:11
nostr the handle is the same lantern bitcoin and uh if you’re looking in sort of the mainstream
0:55:19
world or block rewards um you can find me on linkedin i’m active on linkedin as well
0:55:23
and at blockrewards.com.
0:55:27
Cool.
0:55:27
And sorry, with Block Rewards,
0:55:28
just very quickly, Scott.
0:55:29
So is your customer the employee
0:55:31
that’s getting paid or the business?
0:55:33
The business.
0:55:35
Cool.
0:55:35
Okay, so it’s like a B2B play in that sense.
0:55:37
So you’ve got a business.
0:55:38
I want to start paying people in Bitcoin.
0:55:40
Okay, I come to Block Rewards
0:55:41
and that will help me figure that out.
0:55:43
Yeah.
0:55:44
So we’re just in Canada right now,
0:55:46
US in 2026.
0:55:48
Cool.
0:55:48
And we have aspirations
0:55:51
to get everybody everywhere else.
0:55:53
over a long enough time.
0:55:55
Yeah, and I’m sure you will.
0:55:56
Awesome.
0:55:57
Well, Scott, thank you so much for your time today.
0:55:59
Thanks again.