BTC Sessions - Denied Kid's $8K Surgery: My Bitcoin War on Broken Healthcare | Andy Schoonover

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Mentor Sessions Ep. 039: $8,000 for 15 Minutes – Insurance Denied It Anyway | Bitcoin-Powered Healthcare Revolution with Andy Schoonover (CrowdHealth)Holy shit—$8,000 for a 15-minute ear surgery on his 1-year-old daughter…and insurance denied it as “medically unnecessary.” CrowdHealth CEO Andy Schoonover built the decentralized, Bitcoin-aligned alternative that’s already helped 25,000+ people dump insurance, save ~50% on every bill, fund $1M accidents, and stack sats on unused funds every month. In this BTC Sessions interview, Andy exposes the rigged game: insurance companies + hospitals BOTH profit when prices rise (medical loss ratio scam broken down), 250,000 insured families go bankrupt every year, doctors waste 16–18 hrs/week on bureaucracy, fiat healthcare now in death spiral with 18% premium spike in 2026. The Bitcoin fix: Lightning payments, direct-to-doctor cash, game-theory reciprocity (givers always get funded), and Bitcoin circularity coming for the $5.6 trillion market. From Zuckerberg’s actual house to “the Silk Road of healthcare” — this is the one that makes you cancel your insurance tomorrow.Chapters:00:00 Teaser – The System Is Completely Busted01:12 Andy’s Journey & Zuckerberg’s $16k Check03:46 First Healthcare Company & Bureaucracy Wake-Up Call04:47 The $8,000 Daughter Surgery + Insurance Denial Rage05:22 Satoshi Moment – Launching CrowdHealth (2021)08:02 20% Denials & 250,000 Insured Bankruptcies Yearly10:03 Perverse Incentives: Insurance Profits When Prices Rise12:26 CrowdHealth = 50% Savings Via Direct Pay17:18 Forced Insurance States & Paying the Fine Instead20:02 How CrowdHealth Works ($500 + Community Funding)22:21 Canadian Healthcare Nightmare (MAID = 1 in 20 Deaths)25:59 Jimmy Song Orange-Pills Andy – Bitcoin Integration28:10 The $5.6T Bitcoin Circularity Plan31:22 Every American Will Touch Bitcoin Via Healthcare34:09 Hospitals Love Instant BTC Payment (50%+ Discounts)37:35 Stacking Sats + ACA DCA Math39:52 Game-Theory Reciprocity & Common Objections42:11 The $1M Self-Shot Accident Story (6 Holes, 1 Bullet)52:04 2026 Outlook – 18% Premiums & Death SpiralAbout Andy Schoonover:CEO of CrowdHealth – decentralizing healthcare with Bitcoin-aligned crowdfundingX: Andy Schoonover @andyjschoonoverX: CrowdHealth @joinCrowdHealthSite: https://www.joincrowdhealth.comCheck out previous Episodes:Fitness & Bitcoin - Michael Morelli: https://youtu.be/qkzK3ey41tcMarket Update - James Check: https://youtu.be/0a6-hTVwauo💰 Supported by @BowValleyCU — Tired of big banks? Join Bow Valley Credit Union, run by freedom and sound money advocates, as Canada's only traditional institution directly integrating Bitcoin for seamless, no-hassle transfers, no rehypothecation, self-custody withdrawals, insurance, auditability, and ideal corporate balance sheet integration. If you or your business is in Alberta, switch today! 👉https://qrco.de/bgGaIQ😏 "Supported" by @PantiesBitcoin — Gentlemen, Panties for Bitcoin has you covered! A Bitcoiner brand for Bitcoiners, run by a HODLer family. 👉 https://qrco.de/bgEYRO⚡ POWERED by @Sazmining — the easiest way to mine Bitcoin and take control of your financial future. ⛏️You own the rig 🌍 It runs on clean energy 🔐 You get cheap Bitcoin BELOW Exchange Cost Start stacking wild sats today: 👉 https://qrco.de/bg8Jwq 📚 FREE Bitcoin Book Giveaway: New to Bitcoin? Get Magic Internet Money by Jesse Berger FREE! 👉 Click: bitcoinmentororange.com/magic-internet-money 💡BOOK Private Sessions with Bitcoin Mentor: Master self-custody, hardware, multisig, Lightning, privacy, and more. 👉 Visit bitcoinmentor.io Follow Us on X:• BTC Sessions: @BTCsessions• Nathan: @theBTCmentor• Gary: @GaryLeeNYC#Bitcoin #BitcoinPodcast #CrowdHealth #BitcoinHealthcare #MedicalBankruptcy #HealthcareCrisis #BitcoinFixesThis #DecentralizedHealthcare #LightningNetwork #BitcoinCircularity #CrowdFunding #InsuranceScam #BitcoinAdoption #MedicalFreedom

Holy shit, $8,000 for 15 minutes, 250,000 families every year go bankrupt due to a medical expense, even though they have health insurance. This system is so extremely busted. It's a huge market. I mean, maybe the biggest market on the planet, $5.6 trillion. If we can get Bitcoin circularity within healthcare, that sets the stage for Bitcoin circularity in other places. Once you lose all that subsidization, you go into a death spiral. If I can take down the financial system and the healthcare system, two birds, one stone,

That's Andy Schoonover, CEO of Crowd Health on a mission to drive Bitcoin adoption and re-engineer the Fiat health care system before it collapses and costs you everything. In this episode, we'll discuss Andy's entrepreneurial journey that ultimately led to his clash with the insurance companies. Somebody has got to get this figured out. So it's like, let's make an option. The pervasive incentives corrupting the healthcare system inevitably leading to its downfall. It doesn't take safety in with a PhD in economics to understand that the buyer and the seller wants the price to go up. The price is going on. How Bitcoin is revolutionizing more than just financial markets.

That's the problem with insurance. They got this big pool of fiat. And he's like, man, what can you do with Bitcoin here? Plus, Andy reveals his surprising connection to a billionaire tech mogul. Good morning, Andy. Thank you so much for joining me today. I wanted to start off the conversation by getting a little bit of your history. And we were talking a little bit before hitting the record button there that in my mind,

I had your healthcare journey starting with your daughters, I believe. It was an ear treatment that she needed. But you were saying that this goes back even further your journey into health care and kind of having a realization of what's really going on here. So please kick it off. Tell me, how did you get started on this trajectory? what was the genesis of everything that started happening for you? Yeah, I mean, it's really just kind of an entrepreneurial journey, right?

And we can talk about, you know, the chaos that I had with health care. But my first, you know, start of this journey was back. I was at business school out at Stanford. And there's a, you know, we talked about this, but you've seen the social network. I'm sure a lot of people here have seen the social network. Well, there's this subplot within the social network where Mark Zuckerberg is taking his buddies from East Coast to Silicon Valley. And Eduardo, who was his co-founder, had to go to his dad to get, I think it was $16,000

to pay for this house that they were going to live in. And, you know, funny enough, Mark Zuckerberg walks into my house with a $16,000 check and hands it to us. And so that was actually like our house in the movie, which is super, super funny. It's small world. But, you know, I say that is because I graduated from business school in that period of time. where Google was taken off and Facebook was taking off. And all of my buddies went and, you know, did the big Silicon Valley high tech stuff.

And I kind of always had this mentality of doing something a little bit different. And so I was like, I'm going to go buy a company and see if I can run this thing. And so I bought a little company. And of all places, Dayton, Ohio. And so raised some money to buy that. And it was a, but it was like that fall and I can't get up button. You've probably seen the commercials. Yes, I have.

It looks like it's from like 90s. 1984 or something because I think it was, you know, just the old lady on the ground. I was like, I fall on. I can't get up. And so we bought a company who's actually a competitor to that company, but bought that company and realized when we got in there that all of our customers were like 83. They had two or three diseases. And so, you know, once they're on the floor, it's a reactive thing. Like you lose your customer.

They're going to the hospital. They've broken a hip. They've done something where you've lost that customer. I said, man, what if we like actually took a preventative approach to this? this. And actually, we put a little Bluetooth module in there so they can monitor their blood pressure and their blood sugars and things like that. And so we started funny enough selling that to health insurance plans to keep people from going into the hospital. Sold that to a private equity group after 10 years of running it. And at that point, I was like, man, I'm not doing

health care ever again because it is bureaucratic. It's administrative. They don't make any economic decisions. And so it was my first kind of recognition that this health care system is totally busted. Well, then I came off of that company and most of us get health insurance to our employer, at least here in the United States. And so I didn't have health insurance anymore. And so I went to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as we call it. And I got a plan for me, my wife and my two girls. And it was like, $1,200 bucks a month. And I was like, all right, well, I guess this was my only option. And I joke, it worked until I had to use it. My little one who's one at the time was having recurring ear infection. So we went to the ear nose and

throat doctor who's like she's all has a hole in her ear drum. And so no big deal. We'll get it fixed. You know, it's a 15 minute procedure. We went and did that. We did everything right. We got the bill, I think three or four weeks later. So it was $8,000 for 15 minutes. I was like, holy shit, $8,000 for 15 minutes. But this is what health insurance is for. Like, this is the whole point of health insurance. And a little did I know I was going to get another note a few weeks after that from my health insurance plan who said it was medically unnecessary. And so they weren't going to pay the bill. Then I was like, hold on, medically unnecessary.

My daughter has a whole in her eardrum. Like, how is that medically unnecessary? So we went through a couple appeals processes. And the insurance plan was like, nope, we're not paying for it. And it's like, so I had a stroke an $8,000 check to get this procedure paid for. And it was at that point where I was like, this system is so extremely busted. Somebody has got to get this figured out. I was probably in the same place where a lot of Bitcoiners are over the last 10 years, right?

Like, this system is so busted. How can I do something different? And I'm a bitcoiner as well. And so it's like, you know, oh, we're going to put our money into Bitcoin as opposed to this fiat. Well, I didn't have any options on the healthcare side. And so I was like, let's make an option. Let's create something. You know, maybe it's like the Satoshi moment where he, you know, he came to this revelation that the fiat money system isn't working.

And so we started crowd health in in 2021. And, you know, we've over the last, you know, four and a half years have helped, you know, almost 25,000 people pay their medical bills while being uninsured, basically breaking away from the medical industrial complex and saying, no, no, this is, I'm taking control over my own health care. And I'm not going to be subservient to these big health insurance plans to have them pay for it. I think there is a better way. So that's the quick creation story of crowd health. But I think it's very analogous to what we as Bitcoiners are seeing in the Bitcoin world. You come to a conclusion, our system is busted. How can I fix it?

You know, praise God for Satoshi, you know, however many years it was ago, now, what, 2009, right? And so, I mean, we just had the birthday of the white paper, right, like last week. So we kind of got to that point of like we've got to create something new. that is less reliant upon centralized decision makers and to decentralize it. So that's in essence what we've done with crowd health is decentralized health care. And it's worked beautifully over the last four and a half years. That's fantastic. And immediately, too, like I love that entrepreneurial spirit.

I also love that you, how I've read a word of phrase this, it's like a very authentic entrepreneurial spirit. We're like, I'm not going to do the sexy thing. I'm going to go find that's a good business that I know that I can improve and maybe then sell this later on down the road. Like it's the, it's the, it's not in the movies, it's not the startup. It's like, let me go find a good company. It's like, I think it was Parks and a Rec.

It was like, I'm going to buy the laundromat cleaner supply distribution chain because they do such a fantastic job and I know I can scale it up 30%. I just, I love, I love hearing those kind of stories. I did want to touch on and also the idea that there's a problem, I'm going to fix it. Like, that's the true entrepreneurial spirit. I want to jump back to your daughter's perforated eardrum for a second. The reason being that the thing that kind of set up to me when I was thinking about this is, how the hell are they able to say that it's not medically justified?

Like how is it that insurance companies are able to do that when it's at the direct advice, I assume, of the physician at the time, and not open themselves up to litigation? Yeah, because these health insurance plans are protected. I mean, you've got to think about they have such deep pockets. They do more lobbying in D.C. than anybody. Really? And so, you know, they're protected.

And in fact, what I found out, for the fact is that about 20% of bills close to it. It was 18% I think last year are denied. So you have an almost one out of five chance of getting these bills denied. And I unfortunately was the one out of the five. You know, fortunately I had done well in $8,000 is not that big of a deal. But, you know, for hundreds of millions of Americans, $8,000 is a big deal. I think there's some stat where it's like 70% of people can't come up with $1,000 in an emergency. And so what I found was about 250,000 families every year go bankrupt due to a medical expense, even though they have health insurance.

So that's crazy to me. And so there's just, and there's nothing for us to do if we get denied. I mean, we can go and reach out to the government and say these health insurance plans are, you know, taking advantage of me. But the health insurance plans have all these people in their pockets, right? And so it's a really hard thing for due. There's nothing a consumer can go and do to rectify the situation without, you know, significant legal expenses and things like that.

So they put enough friction in the system where it's more like, I'm not going to do it. I think only like 2% of the bills that were denied last year were appealed. And so, you know, they make it so difficult for you to do this that they don't do it. And so they kind of manage their economics around, you know, denying bills. There's this crazy thing in the United States and people, but Bitcoiners understand incentives. Incentives are everything. And so, you know, the incentive for the U.S. government is to continue to print money to give people free things so that they get elected.

Like, that's the incentive. The incentive for the health insurance plans is a little bit more complex, but it's still easy, I think, for a bitterner to understand where we have this thing called a medical loss ratio and not to get in too much detail, but 15% of your premium can be used for profit with a health insurance plan. So if you have $1,000 of premium, which is used around numbers, that health insurance plan can make $150. And the politicians in D.C. think this is a great idea because you don't want to fleece Americans by, you know, over-profiting off of their health care. The problem with this now is that how do I grow that 150 by 10% to 165? Well, premiums have to go from $1,000 to $1,100.

And so they have every incentive in the world to see these premiums rise because it means they make more money. And so that's just the perverse incentive system within health care. So you're screwed twice. Within the year, they're managing to this 85, this 15% profit. So if it goes to, let's say, you know, the 85% of medical costs go to 86 or 87, they start denying bills so they can maximize their 15%. in months, in years, excuse me. And then over the long term, they want to see medical bills rise, which that has, right, clearly.

And so we're screwed that way, too. So people think this is like very, very complex health care. It's not complex. You have the buyer of health care, these health insurance plans, they want the price to go up. You have the seller of health care, which is these big hospital systems. They clearly want the price to go up. So you have the buyer and the seller of the service, both wanting the price to go up. up. You know, it doesn't take safety and with the PhD in economics to understand if the buyer and the

seller want the price to go up, the price is going up, right? And so that's the problem that we have within health care in the United States. And what we're trying to do is saying, no, no, no, we want to apply some market forces to health care to drive down costs. And in essence, what we've seen over the last four and a half years and 25,000 plus bills is that we're getting prices for our members that are about 50% less than health insurance plans. And so, you know, just by paying directly, your doctor directly, without having an insurance bureaucracy, you know, in the middle for billing

and all that kind of stuff. So it's really a decentralization of healthcare that reduces costs, you know, by about 50%. That's incredible. I'm trying to, like, frame it out in my mind because I'm coming from Canada, so I'm coming from the Socialist Republic of Canada, which I'll get your thoughts on that in a second as well, too.

But are there government subsidies involved of these insurance programs of the hospitals as well, too? because what I'm trying to think of in my mind is like, okay, if the, the customer is not the person buying the insurance plan, right? Obviously, that can't be the case. So it's almost like the hospital is the customer of the insurance plan or there's a government. There's some other, there's somebody else calling the tune if both parties, both parties want to push up the prices. Yeah, yeah. It's, you know, I think it's a wink, wink, you know, between the hospitals and the health insurance plans. I think ultimately the hospitals raise prices, you know, every single year so much so that the, health insurance plans are kind of like, okay, fine. And, you know, and so then we have this

two to three times X, you know, inflation in health care because they can get away with it. And the health insurance plans have an incentive for it to see, see it rise. And so there's this kind of oligopoly, you know, situations that's, that's happening here that if anybody had significant amount of money, they could for sure, you know, take some legal action on this because there, there is no doubt some monopolistic behavior that, that, that's, that, that's, you know, that is happening. And then you have the government on the other side who are now subsidizing, you know, these health plans. And as we know, like everything that's subsidized by the government, the price goes up. We've, most of us have probably seen that graph or it's this graph over the last 30

years. And it looks at all the, you know, products and services that we buy. And it's like anything that the government touches, healthcare, you know, public education, higher education, all that stuff is going up, you know, much, much more than inflation, two to three times inflation and everything else is going down like the cost of your TV has gone down your cell phone has gone down everything else has gone down and so it's just a it's such a pure example of like any time the government gets involved in this stuff the price goes up because nobody cares um and that's the problem we have in healthcare is nobody cares you can go get like if i i'm basically shopping with somebody else's credit card right so yeah give me everything give me

everything you want, you know. And we've, and again, not to go into too much detail, but, you know, the rebuttal against what the statement I just made was, oh, well, people have really high deductibles, which basically means the amount you have to pay before the insurance plan pays anything. And so they should care. But my, my rebuttal to that rebuttal is anytime you have anything really big, which is where the vast majority of the health care costs are going, you bust through your deductible anyway. And so you really don't care. 80% of the cost in the United States are for chronic diseases. If you have a chronic disease, you're busting through your deductible. And therefore, you don't really care with the prices. Like, give me, give me whatever you want to give me. And so that's

the problem that we have, you know, is consumption without limitation on price. You know, if you could go and get, we had this situation recently, if you could go get a knee replacement that is, you know, a mile from you, and it's $25,000 versus me having to drive $100,000. miles and it's $12,000, would you drive that 100,000 or that 100 miles for to save, you know, $12 or $13,000? In any other situation, we would say, I'm driving 100 miles to save that money. In health care, we said, no, no, no, no, no, I want to go here. I want to go a mile from me because I'm not ultimately paying for it.

So that's a perfect example of how these incentives are totally screwed up and why our health care prices continue to go up. No, that makes perfect sense. Well, in that example, too, like the only. cost really is your time driving. So you don't give a shit about the dollar value of the surgery that's going on. 100%. Imagine mining Bitcoin cheaper than buying on an exchange with direct payouts hitting your wallet like clockwork. Saz mining makes it real. You own the rig. No gimmicks. It's your asset pumping out Bitcoin every single day. No markup on hardware or electricity. They get paid when

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Unlock expert guidance from top educators. Schedule a free chat at Bitcoin Mentor.io and get started hassle-free today. All right, let's jump back into the episode. Correct me if I want to two, so I was talking to my wonderful co-host, Gary. who's not here today, he's slacking. He's in New Jersey, and he was telling me that, like, he's not able to get, like, just simple catastrophic insurance and that it's mandated that he has it as well, too. So not only are you pushed into this funnel, but am I correct in knowing that, like,

in some areas, at least you have to buy this product as well, too. You're a forced buyer? You're a forced buyer in five states. New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, California, and I'm probably missing one, but and DC. And so you, you're, they force you to buy health insurance or they find you as a result of that,

which is, you know, absolutely ludicrous, you know, from my, from my perspective. So, um,

you know, the fines depending upon where you are are not that, that bad. And so oftentimes we got a lot of members in all of those states, um, because they just pay the fine. They're like, screw it.

I'm saving more money with crowd health than, um, you know, I would pay the fine. I mean, I had a guy the other day who was paying 50, $50,000 a year for health care, 50 grand in just premiums. And so, you know, for crowd health, it's about, for a family of four, it's, it's about

$7,000. And actually last year, we only charged, not to get into the details too much, but like max of $7,000, but we only have charged $6,000. So he's looking at this and said, okay, you know, $44,000 I can pay if I want to go with health insurance or I can pay like a $3,000 fine and go with crowd health. He's like, this math makes sense for me. And I was like, yeah, it makes total sense. Just pay the fine, join crowd health and you get all the other benefits of not having health insurance.

I just want to add that I used to do the exact same thing in a very small little example. The old job that I used to work at, it was cheaper for me to pay the parking tickets than to pay the cost of parking. Yeah. They never, yeah. So I just got the parking tickets. They didn't hit me very often. I get one or two, maybe a month, but it was way cheaper than paying for parking. So I had absolutely no issue with it.

Again, it's just the automatic incentives lining up. One thing that also jumped out even just talking like, it's so hard to unravel all the little like fiat intricacies when you get into this stuff. But one, you're finding people who might not be paying for health insurance because they can't afford it. So that just seems completely counterintuitive. And then additionally, there's the idea of like you're talking about like most people don't have a thousand bucks

or in the conversation. And I was even thinking like the state of like people are so on the hamster wheel, like two parents working got no time. Your food is shit. You're falling apart. Most people like not maybe not men or most people. Like a good subsection of people. If you ask them if they get even.

borrow $1,000 from a friend, like no questions asked in an emergency, I'm not sure that they even have time to maintain those kind of relationships. They even had like a community that they can lean on at this point. Yeah, totally. I mean, and so what we did when we started was like, look, I think everybody can come up with 500 bucks. You can figure out 500 bucks. Like, I don't want anybody, you know, 250,000 people went bankrupt with health insurance last year. Over the last four and a half years, zero people have with crowd health have gone bankrupt as a result of a medical issue. And we have our set at like, hey, if you have a big procedure, you need to have a little bit of skin in the game. And so the way that it works is you pay the first 500 bucks, let's just say it's a $10,000

surgery. You pay the first $500 and then the community of, you know, 20,000 or 15,000 people now will help you out with the remaining 9,500. And so in essence, what happens is you're 500 plus the community is $9,500. You now have $10,000 of cash to go and pay for your procedure directly. So you're paying the doctor direct. There's no intermediaries. There's no anybody else between you and the doctor. Like, they can actually provide the care that you need as opposed to a health insurance company, you know, dictating what you can and can't do. We just said, go and do it. Whatever you and your doctor think is right, then go and do it. I always say, like, you work for whoever pays you. And, you know, ultimately the doctors are being paid by health insurance companies. You know,

in your country, the doctors are being paid by the government. And so they actually work for the government. I mean, our doctors work for the insurance companies. And so, you know, I want the doctor to work for me, not for the insurance company, especially when it comes to my health care. You know, and so this is a great because it's now between you and your doctor, no intermediaries. The doctor works for you. And what we have found is like the docs are like, this is awesome.

Like we can do now what we need to do to make you healthy. Under the insurance system, it is I need to deal with your sympathy. which is typically a pharmaceutical solution versus our system, which is, hey, now we can actually start talking about your lifestyle. And are you working out? And are you getting great sleep? And are you, you know, all these types of things. And you can actually spend more time with somebody because you don't have this health

insurance company that says you have to keep your, you know, time with your patient to X amount of minutes and all this kind of crap that they have to do. So it's just a totally different model. And I get, again, once you decentralize some of these systems, it works so much better. We see that in Bitcoin. We see that in healthcare. I think there's probably dozens of other industries that we can decentralize as well. But I think way more efficient if you get this decentralized, have the decision making between the doctor and the patient.

That's the way it should be. No other kind of perverse incentive related parties involved. And so it just works much, much better. I completely agree. I completely agree. It's funny. It's just like we're taking that Bitcoin kind of ethos and we're applying it to the base layer like Maslow's high. hierarchy of needs. Like, let's just fix our money and our food and our health, first and foremost,

then we can kind of build, build up from there. I'm curious if you have explored the cluster fuck that is the Canadian healthcare system at any point in time during just your, your travels here, because for anyone is not aware, it sucks. Like, there's a lot of places in the country. You can't possibly get a doctor. If you need anything kind of major, you're looking at wait times over a year. And I just double-checked the stats last night. One in 20 deaths is a little the last, but one in 20 deaths in Canada are medical assisted suicide. So that's our healthcare system.

Is they're just like, hey, you're sad, you're down, you're hurting? Let's just take you out back. Just kill yourself. Just kill yourself. Which is, it's a, yeah, it's a tragedy. I mean, there's been a kind of a viral story where this woman, this was back in the spring, so about six months ago, she needed an MRI

for potential brain cancer. Like her doctor was like, yeah, you need brain cancer. You might have brain cancer. You need an MRI. She had to wait. It was a 2026 date. I forget exactly when it was. So March, she's told in 2026, you can have this MRI for your potential brain cancer.

And you're like, what the hell? Like, that's absolutely crazy. I know in some parts of your, you know, in your country, like you can get it more, more accessible. But there are many, many parts, as you said, where you've got to wait. You got to wait. I mean, I've also saw situations in which people had broken bones that they couldn't get surgery on, that they had to wait. that they had to wait so long that the bone went in at the wrong, you know, healed at the wrong way. So they had to re-break the bone to fix it because they had to wait so long.

You're like, guys, like this is, this is so, well, it's less expensive. You know, well, maybe I don't think it actually is because you're paying ridiculous taxes to pay for it. And your outcomes aren't as, as good. And so, you know, it's a total cluster. And everybody wants to say, let's just not deal with the system. Let's just let the government deal with it. We see how that goes with the Fiat, you know, monetary system. It's a tragedy when that ends up happening.

So, you know, we're in a battle against that. So as you can imagine, everybody who wants Medicare for all. That hates the crowd health model. Everybody who's like, no, no, no, I want self-sovereity over my own health care loves our model. And that's why something like 20 or 25% of our community currently are known Bitcoiners. You know, they've actually signed up using a Bitcoin and Coke codes. We know that they came from, you know, Marty or Natalie or safe or somebody like that because I've been on their podcast as well. And so it's a great community to be a part of it because we have

a lot of people who are like, no, no, I'm going to be, I'm going to be responsible for my own, my own health care. That's the, that's the community I want to share health care expenses with, not the people who are, you know, entitled and thinking health care is a right and I can be able to consume as much of it as I want, even though I sit, you know, on the couch all day, eating brownies, right? Like, that's not who we're looking for in the community. Completely agree. It's funny, too, even just quick side note,

the last time that I was in a Canadian emergency room, I took an angle grinder to my thumb accidentally, and I sat there, I don't know how long was there. I got to the point where I just said, fuck this, and I left and got super glue and put it back together. Because I got so tired of waiting, and like, it's, like, for people in the U.S. that don't know, it really sucks.

You do not want universal health care. It's atrocious, and it's only getting worse by the day. I want to unpack that a little bit. So what is currently like the relationship between crowd health and Bitcoin? And was this something, were you a Bitcoiner before you started crowd health? Or was this something that you found along the way? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I am I'm friends with Jimmy Song. I'm sure most people listening to this is, you know, knows Jimmy.

I live in Austin. We, you know, have friends in common. So I met him over steak, of course, for lunch. That's just how he rolls, right? And I was telling him about this. He's like, man, the problem with health insurance is that, you know, these health insurance companies have this big pool of fiat that's declining, you know, every single day. And back when I was talking to him, you know, CPI was 7, 8 percent, something like that.

So it was, you know, I will still argue with you. CPI is significantly higher than what they're telling us it is today. If you just go in the grocery store, you'll, you'll notice. But he's like, that's the problem with insurance is they got this big pool of fiat. And he's like, man, what if, what can you do with Bitcoin here? You know, like, how can you figure out Bitcoin? I was like, Bitcoin, you know, tell me more. And so he, he orange-pilled me. I went into Bitcoin, so I'm class of 21. You know, fortunately after the kind of, it went down in 21. So I'm in the teens, thankfully. And so, you know, I started thinking about Bitcoin and in researching it and read all safe books and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, man, we've got to figure out a way to incorporate Bitcoin into what we do. You know, we, we, we, we, we you've got to take stages in this. You know, it's, it's, it's taken, you know, what, 15, 16 years for us to get to where we are

in Bitcoin. I think it's going to take, you know, a decade for us to figure this out on the health care side. But ultimately, what I want to do is I want to be able to transact all of these expenses in Bitcoin. You know, we've got a good group of bitcoins. I want them to transact in Bitcoin. I want them to be able to pay hospitals and doctors in Bitcoin. Because I think Bitcoin circularity within healthcare, which I just saw the last number, is like $5.6 trillion in the United States last year.

Or maybe it's forecast for this year. But it's a huge market. I mean, maybe the biggest market on the planet, right? 5.6 trillion. If we can get Bitcoin circularity within healthcare, I think that sets the stage for Bitcoin circularity in other places. And so I'm a big medium of exchange guy. I know there's, you know, there's debate within Bitcoin, medium exchange, store value, all this kind of stuff.

I think it's both, you know, it's great store of value and it could be a great medium exchange. And so, you know, we're actually talking to one of the largest health systems in the United States. It's a top 10 health system who is contemplating accepting Bitcoin. And so we're working hard to get doctors, hospital systems set up so that they can accept Bitcoin. So we have Bitcoiners on one side who want to pay. we have these hospital systems on the other side who are okay with receiving. And if we can build that network, then I think we have something really, really special. And I think it not only does good things for the health care system, it does great things for Bitcoin.

So if I can take down the financial system and the health care system as we currently know it, and what is it, two birds, one stone, like, man, let's go. It's the two most regulated industries probably on the planet too. So I spend a lot of money on regulatory attorneys, but that's ultimately what we're trying to do. So I can get some more Bitcoinsers to sign up. The back end is already, it's ready. You know, we've built it on lightning. And so it's super easy.

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You're going to see a hospital. It's going to happen no matter what, which means that the entire U.S. population would eventually have at least one touchpoint with Bitcoin. At least see it, right, that is used, that has paid a little familiarity with it. Wow. So that would be essentially a $5 trillion market that is then accepting Bitcoin. And for the record, too, I'm with you on the medium of exchange side in the sense that, I think it was Parker Lewis that I think first pointed this out to me in the sense

that you can't separate the two. For it to be a store of value means that you must have the anticipation of being able to exchange it in the future. They're one of the same just on a different time scale. 100%. I was office for a while, Bitcoin Commons right next to Parker. And so I think Parker was one of my big influencers of, you know, understanding that. So he's a member of crowd health.

So is Safeghelf. So is Natalie. Robert Breedlove, like Jimmy, you know, all these people that you know in kind of Bitcoin circles are members of crowd health. Because I think they see that, right? They see this, that they've got to, you know, be a part of something, even though it's small right now. and we're not doing a ton of on the Bitcoin side,

but the vision is to have this all being, you know, transacted over the Lightning Network. The other thing, too, is, you know, we got a pretty significant backend fintech system that's unfortunately built upon the Fiat system. And, you know, for me to go out to the community and say, I need $10,000, it takes like four or five days for that money to get from, you know, say you were a member and I was giving you money.

For me to you, it takes like four or four, five days between, you know, everything's settling and the banks transferring and all this kind of crap. And ultimately, all they're doing is they're being rent seekers, right? They're just holding on to this money. They're getting the interest off of it, right? And not allowing us to have it. Whereas lightning, and we've, we've already, you know, tested it out. And it's like, like that, boom, I can get you money in seconds. And so it's just a much better system to be built upon. And so we just need some other things to fall in place here to make it to make it work. So, you know, I would just say, is any bitcoinsers out there who are thinking about health care for next year, like join us in a

mission run not just health care, but know that my heart is to also change the financial system. And we need more bitcoins to join so that we can get the scale necessary to do this. I do want to ask kind of like your outlook for next year as well, too, but before I jump up that point, because what struck me is like, I was trying to think of like, what would the hospital's incentives be in order to accept Bitcoin? How am I going to convince herself? What will be the benefit to them too. But I think you just pointed out because in those sort of situations, you've got a member who's got, let's say we've got an emergency situation, a member that's going in, is the hospital basically just holding like you, like, are they just holding an IOU for how much

they have and waiting for settlement? Or are you having to like take cash from somewhere else and pay it in the meantime and then regroup? Because there's that delay in between. Because to be able to turn to the hospital and look, I can pay for the surgery right now, final settlement, I think would be, I think they would like to have that, because I imagine they have to deal with a lot of loss or basically chasing after people for bills after the fact. Yeah. Yeah. You. You hit it on the nail in the head. The great thing with that is you're actually keeping the float. And every for every day that you wait, the hospital doesn't have their money into

their willing to negotiate. And so if you were to go to the ER, typically what happens in the United States is, not typically, this does happen in the United States. You go to the ER, they have to take care of you regardless of whether you have insurance. So there's a law that says, you know, regardless of your insurance status, you have to be taken care up. So you go in the hospital, you get out, and then 30 to 60 days later, they send you these bills, you know, and they're usually like 30 pages long and you can't understand them. And that's on purpose. And so then what we do is we then take those bills and we've got a team of

negotiators and including attorneys on our side who will call the hospital and say, listen, if we can pay you in the next 24 hours, would you take X price? And most of the time, you know, that price is about 50% less than what health insurance plans pay, but they get it immediately. And so, and we've kind of already pre-funded that money to make that deal. So we can get it to them, you know, immediately. And they're like, yeah, you know, we'll take it. If I don't have to fight with health insurance plans, then, you know, money, money now is a lot more valuable to me than money in three, three to six months when a health insurance plan will pay me. So that's why we do the negotiation for you and those emergency visits. And then for non-emergency visits,

So let's just say you're going to get a knee replacement or something. And it's, you know, knee replacement will probably be $15,000 to $17,000 or something like that. You know, we, we fund it first so that you have the money and you can pay the doctor as you walked in to your surgery. So that doctor gets the money immediately. You know, as a result of that, you know, the prices, like I said, are about 50%. We had this woman here in Austin, actually, who tore her ACL playing pickleball. I went to the ER. They tried to get her to like a hospital affiliated day.

doctor and they chartered they said it was going to be like 12 22 or 23,000 or something like that. Well, we had another doctor in town who's really good. We're in Austin, which is the University of Texas this year. He does a bunch of the joints for the University of Texas athletic program. So he's really, really good. He's like, look, if you can pay me on the point at the point of care the day of, I'll take 11,000. So it went from 20, whatever it was, 23, 24, something like that to 11,000 just by paying them at the point of care and getting out of that.

hospital system. So that's the way that we work. We're not asking people up front a bunch of money. We can, you know, get that funded for you prior to you having to pay that. So it's a really efficient way of doing things. That makes sense. Right. There's a cost to everything. I think probably even within the existing corrupt system, people would have forgotten that there's a cost to having to deal with the insurance, that there could be a benefit to going direct to the customer being paid upfront. I also just did one to point out. 30 to 40% of the costs are administrative. Yeah. So, you know, the doctors, there was a study that came out, I don't know, maybe six or nine months ago, something like that, where doctors are spending between 16 and 18 hours a week

fighting with health insurance plans to get paid. The administrative component. So imagine like you spending two days of your week, basically, fighting to get paid, which means you're not taking care of patients, you're not generating revenue. You know, it's a total cluster. And that's why these doctors are willing to take much, much less if you pay them at the point of care. You get rid of that bureaucracy. No, 100%. Lastly, on the kind of the Bitcoin note, not last day, but another thing on the Bitcoin note I wanted to hit is what kind of, what share of members are actually saving in Bitcoin? And I was curious. So last night before we jumped on, I ran the math too quickly. I looked up with the Affordable Care Act cost I found was $590 per month. If you DCA'd that over the last

four years, you would have spent $28,910. You have over $73 million and you'd be up to $79K right now. And for comparison, I found that the average birth in the U.S. was 18,865, which means if you started saving a Bitcoin four years ago instead of that stupid affordable care act, you could afford four babies right now. I mean, it's crazy. You know, so an individual, what did you say is 580 or something like that or five, whatever? Yeah, 590 was what I was able to pull up. 590. So with crowd health, it's 200. So you're saving, you know, 390 a month.

And that's max. So what I say max is, here's the other cool thing. that we're doing. And again, it's to align incentives with the community. So we have two components. You pay us 60 bucks a month. That's for my administrative. And then I ask you for up to $140 to help somebody else out in the community. So it's maxed out at $200 a month. But we've only asked for that $140 four times and four years. So this month, we're only asking for 90 of that 140. And we have a system in place where that 50, if you're a bitcoiner, automatically gets stacked in Bitcoin. And so if you're a family, it's more like $200 gets stacked in Bitcoin every month.

So if the community does well and we're not asking for all 140, the excess, the difference between what we ask and the max is stacked in Bitcoin. And so you have this kind of little Bitcoin healthcare savings account being created as a result of joining crowd health. So we enable you to do that. It's super, super easy. And so we're trying to, yeah, help Bitcoiners stack while paying for health care. Beautiful. Now, Andy, imagine for a moment, I'm a critic. I come in and say this sounds not possible.

People aren't going to pay for my shit. What if I have some sort of like catastrophic triple bypass surgery? What are the kind of pushbacks that you get on this sort of business structure around health care? And can you address them? Yeah. I think you hit on the two big ones. like, okay, so why in the, why would the community, let's just say you broke your arm and it was, you know, $8,000 or something? Why would a community help me with $8,000?

Or, you know, with a broken arm. It's not like a heart tugger, right? It's not like my kid with cancer, you know, but we have a really cool system of kind of game theory here that happens, where we go to the community with that, you know, let's just say it was an $8,000 broken arm. You're paying $500. So we go to $75, go get $7,500. We ask, we'll just say 75 people for 100 bucks. And they can, if they say yes, then $100 goes from their account to your account. And if they say no, then we'll just ask the next person. So why would a person say yes?

Well, when I ask for that broken arm, it shows the last 10 times I've been asked, what have I said? Have I said yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Or have I said no, no, no, no, right? And so imagine getting a request for me. And it said, you know, the last 10 times Andy's been asked, he said, no. Are you going to help me? Probably not, right? And that's what we've seen in the data is people who are takers and not givers don't typically get their bills funded. But people who are givers to the community, 100% of the time, they've gotten their bills paid. And so we use some game theory here to say, okay, you know, this is a voluntary giving. We have to do that for, you know, regulatory reasons. But there is this kind of reciprocity that is created within the community that, 98% of the time I ask somebody, they'll say yes.

And so the 2% that say no, we just ask the next 2% of people on the list. And that's how those, excuse me, that's how those bills get funded. So, you know, we've funded, I think it's 99.9% of the bills, that 0.1%, the bills that were submitted to the community, that 0.1% are from people who are takers and not givers where the community was like, you're not a good member of this community. no way, right? And so that it works really, really well. And then the second point you made, which I think is a big one, and one of the biggest concerns is like, okay, what about the big one? You know, we had this guy last summer and we're actually doing a little documentary on him

where he was in Montana fishing and so he was in bear country, wolf country. So he had a 44 in his, in his, you know, strapped to his chest in his holster. He caught a fish. He was reeling it in. he leaned down, the 44 fell out of his, his holster, hit a rock perfectly, went off, bullet went into his calf, out the back of his calf, into his thigh, out the top of his thigh, into his chest, and out the back, right? So one bullet, six holes. He was in the middle of nowhere, so they had to medevac. His wife was with him. His wife took off his shirt and, like,

took a tourniquet around his thigh because they thought they hit the femoral artery. And she ran up to the top of the closest hill called 911, a helicopter landed in the middle of the stream to pull this guy out. He gets to the hospital. He goes into a coma. He finally comes out of the coma after, I think it was a couple weeks. And then he had to drive home to California because they couldn't get on an airplane. He went to sepsis on the way to California. And so this was almost a million dollar bill, Monsterville. And so we went in and we negotiated it. We got that bill down to somewhere like 200 or 250,000 or something like that. And the crowd was able to fund that, you know, without a problem. And so we've had, I think, three dozen cancer cases now, something like that.

And they're like colon. I saw one go through this morning. That was for breast cancer. And so we've had these really big bills, these really big situations in which, you know, I kind of say health care is expensive if you do it through health insurance. It's not nearly as expensive if you pay direct. So we've had lots of these big bills, hard. We had a bitcoiner, unfortunately, two weeks ago, had a heart attack over the weekend. He's fine now, thank God. But, you know, that's going to be no problem for the community to fund. So we've had a lot of these big bills.

And you have 15,000 people who've got your back in case one of these big things happen. One lady had, I think it was non-Honchkins lymphoma. It might have been melanoma. I can't remember which one it was. But she had a pharma bill that was $40,000 a month. a month a month and so we went in and negotiated directly with a pharmaceutical company again ripping out all the middlemen and got it for $2,500 a month. So, you know, these things are really expensive and everybody's like, well, what about these multi-million dollar bills? I'm like, do you really think a brain surgery even at, you know, Stanford or something and it's a five-hour brain surgery really costs a million dollars?

Like, no, like it doesn't. You know, they are ripping you off. because they got the brand name and they can charge that because the insurance companies will pay it. But when you're a cash pay, direct pay, you can get that down 75, 80, 90 percent oftentimes. So we can really help with the big ones. And in fact, I say we're better with the big ones than we are with the small ones. And so that's, that's, you know, one of the benefits of paying direct. Amazing. I'm curious, maybe you can't disclose, but I'm curious what the hell with the guy that got shot six times by his own 45.

Like what unbelievably terrible luck and it landed in the worst possible way. It's been like directly under him. How much was the helicopter? I think they billed like $70,000 or something like that. Okay, yeah, I would have guessed around there. Yeah, they build 70. I can't remember exactly what he got it for, but I think it was, you know, it was still like 20 or something like that.

We negotiated it down to. But, you know, a helicopter flight emergency going, you know, a couple hours of the New York hospital. I'm kind of like, sounds kind of like a $20,000 bill. I mean, it seems kind of reasonable to me. So,

you know, it's still not inexpensive, but when you got a community back to you to pay for it and negotiation capabilities that we do, then, you know, it's much more manageable.

Agreed. You know, it's funny. The reputation thing, I think, is fascinating. I'm curious how you came up with this model and if you were terrified,

but you first started implementing it as well, too, because, I mean, you had that, depends on your faith in the community. of which way this might go very, very quickly. But I've noticed this constant thread in Bitcoin

that in a weird sort of sense, I'll see if I can articulate it. When we no longer have to have any trust in the money, like there's no trust in the money anymore, your reputation becomes so much more valuable. We see trust within each other. Like as soon as I go to Bitcoin meet up our conference, like immediately we're like fast friends,

same footing, and we're good to go. And I think that your reputation. The world views are the same. Yes. And I think your reputation on a hard money standard is so much more important than it is on a fiends. or maybe it's just more elevated on a fiont standard.

So I'm curious, one, how you kind of came up with that. And yeah, if you're a little bit nervous, implementing such a system. Yeah, I would say, like, you know, with entrepreneurs, you kind of always ask them, like, what keeps you up at night? And I will tell you through the first year, you know, getting a big event like this one was what kept me up at night, you know, a Nicky you baby. Like those Nickyub babies are, man, they're wickedly expensive. And so, like, please, like, you know, God, like allow our people to be healthy.

and, you know, thank God that they were, they were healthy for the first year. Now I'm like, when I hear these things come through the system, I'm like, man, I love the fact that we can help these people in really hard situations. Because I know I don't, I have an incentive to get these bills paid, right? Like I, unlike the health insurance companies based upon, you know, what you're just saying to trust is if I don't help somebody get their bill paid, I'm screwed, right? Because my trust is, you know, obliterated. You know, if Jimmy Song went on, you know, X and said, Andy, you know, didn't get my bill paid, I would be toast. And so, like, I've got every incentive in the world to fight for you as opposed to fight against you, which is what the health insurance companies are doing, fighting against you. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that the trust has been built up over the last, you know, four and a half years.

And I think people, you know, are finally, you know, trusting us. I mean, inevitably, you get people who are really, really pissed off. you know, because they, we had this guy who's, you know, hammering us right now online because he wanted to go and get a surgery for something that was before he got into the community. And so he wanted the community to pay for it. And we have a very strict kind of preexisting condition thing where it's like, look, you can't just jump in the community and drop things on the community and then leave. Like, that's just not right.

It's just not morally right from my perspective. But this was a $100,000 surgery that only one doctor in the entire. planet did and we knew he was getting bamboozled by this by this doctor right um and so he's really pissed off at us because we're like look it's a preexisting condition and you're getting bamboozled by this doctor and so you know we're not going to submit that to the crowd we were we're going to protect the crowd you know in that in that situation which i think is the right thing to do um and he went and got the surgery ever anyway he paid a hundred thousand dollars out of his own pocket and guess what it didn't work.

Shocking, you know. And so there's situations like that that we have to make a call, but it's for these wacky, like, you know, miracle drug, miracle procedure types of things where these doctors are like really trying to scam people from my perspective. And so we try to protect the community from these scammy doctors and people are pissed off about it. And it's like, look, I'm happy to go on trial on this one because this is one where I think the community will be like, hell yeah, we're not paying for, you. you know, a bamboozle doctor to line his pocket. So it's not a perfect situation,

but I would say that if you went and looked at any of our reviews, like people love the fact that we are super, you know, customer-centric because we have to be. We have to have that trust with our customers that we're going to, you know, get these bills, help them get these bills paid when they come. No, 100%. Like the term quack exists for a reason.

And then also like looking to have the community pay for your house if it burns down while the garage is currently on fire, it's kind of like, no, that's not how the system works. We're all taking on risk, but it comes from the uncertainty. If you already have the certainty of needing the surgery, supposedly, then it's not, it wouldn't be entered into the community. It makes absolutely perfect sense. I do.

In that situation, by the way, just we want to have, like, make sure that we, we're not the ultimate arbitrator of that. So if you, if we say no to a bill because it's from a quack, then you can appeal it to a group of crowd health members. So we have a group of, of members that say like, look, we'll make our case. The member can make their case. And then we'll let the community decide.

If the community wants to pay for it, then great. If they don't, then that's fine too. So, you know, we're not the ultimate arbiters. We do a filter. But if you have any issue with, you know, our decision, you can appeal it. And it's beyond our control. It's a five person panel. Whoever gets three votes, you know, that's the way it's going to go.

And so we don't want to be, you know, that bureaucratic middleman to say, what can and can't happen. It goes to the community in that situation. So, and, you know, funny enough, this guy doesn't want to send it to the, to that appeals panel because he knows he's going to lose, you know, because it's very, very clear this docs to quack. So it's a hard thing to navigate sometimes, but we do our best. And I think we've built trust within the community that's like, since we have no incentive to get these bills not paid, it, I think people trust us in that we do a pretty good job of filtering out some of the quack stuff. Beautiful. I did want to ask for anyone listening as well too.

filtering out like the ethes of the world and the doge coins of the world, if you will. The shit coin doctors. Yeah, we're the shit coin filter. I love it. For anyone that's looking to healthcare kind of in 2026, we're looking to the future a little bit to what is the current state? Are things going to be worse next year?

Are things going to be better? Those laws where you must, you can't have like the catastrophic and you must have a plan. Any chance of those going away? Is it, are we declining and still, or are we seeing any raises? of sunshine on the horizon. Yeah, no, there's no raise of sunshine, unfortunately. I mean, we're reliant upon the government to get this stuff figured out. As you know, we're in the

government shutdown right now. It's over these big subsidies that the government is paying these health insurance plans to take care of people. I think it's a bad idea to have these subsidies. You know, we're giving people that ray of hope so that they don't have to pay for these ridiculous prices. I think prices are supposed to go up 18% next year from what I understand for health insurance. Whoa. And so people are starting to get these. I would say we had more. customers sign up in the last four days of October than we did in any month since January. And so people are like pissed off. They're ready for something different. And I think we finally now have given them, you know, an alternative. And so we're seeing, you know, huge growth. And it's,

it's so cool to finally see this happening. That's great. I imagine you probably run the numbers. I would think at some point in time that this government subsidized health care, both Canada and in the U.S. to Medicare as well as the Affordable Care Act. It's going to implode, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, what we're seeing now is these prices are so high that the healthy people are saying, hey, I'm tired of subsidizing the unhealthy people. And so they're dropping out of the system.

And so once you lose all that subsidization from the healthy people, you go into a death spiral, ultimately. And I think we're seeing that in the United States health care system. And so, you know, I think that there's a risk there, which, you know, finally people are like, okay, fine, let's just let the government, you know, do it. And so ultimately, what we're trying to fight against is that narrative, right? Like, no, no, no, no, don't let the government do it. Like, there is an alternative way of doing it here.

And so ultimately, we want to get our name out there to say, there is an alternative. We don't have to do Medicare for all. We don't have to end up like Canada, no offense. No, no, not take it. It's awful. Yeah. And so, you know, there is, we want to create some scale here so that we can actually go to some of these legislators and say, look, there's a viable option.

without having to do Medicare for all. And at a minimum, give people a choice. Like, give people a choice if they want to go with the government system or with a private system. And we think we've built a private system, a community-based system that's way more effective than anything else out there. So give people a choice and what they want to do. I think ultimately that's the ultimate freedom, right, giving people a choice as to how

they're going to spend their money. That's great. Just that of curiosity, because I just realized a small parallel, it's not a big one, but a small parallel. Were you aware of the Silk Road in Ross Ulbrook before finding Bitcoin? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I just realized like this is a completely voluntary. Yeah. This is a, this is a, had you already gone down the kind of libertarian, Austrian economic, um, and cap rabbit hole because I just realized that that's,

that's exactly what we were building is like a completely voluntary, uh, community organization market led healthcare solution. I've always been libertarian leading. Um, I always kind of like keep government out of my business. Um, and, and so that's,

that's always been my kind of political leanings. And so I'm, you know, the last, other than the last one, the two before that, I voted for libertarian candidates. This one, I felt like the alternative was just like too socialistic. And so I couldn't go that direction. But yeah, I've always been, always been libertarian. In fact, I first realized, I first wanted to get into Bitcoin in like 2000. Go see, I sold my company.

Yeah, so it's 2012, 2013. And I was like, man, I told one of my buddies, I was like, I'm just going to put 10 grand into this. You know, if I lose it, it's not the end of the world. And I'm like, and he's like, dude, you're an idiot. Like, that's the worst decision ever. Like, we've all had these conversations. Yeah, like, you're an idiot. And I was like, ah.

And then I forget exactly what it was. But it was like that time where it was like 200 bucks and it went up to like 800 bucks or something like that. And I was like, oh, I missed it. I missed it. I missed it. I can't do it now. And then I'm seeing here and it's 100 and whatever it is today. I don't even pay attention to the price anymore because I don't only care.

And so I'm like, well, you know, that's a stupid me. And so when people ask me, I was like, look, this is my story. I've thought I missed it at 800 bucks. You're going to miss it at 110,000 or whatever we're at today. You know, because I think it's going to a million plus. And so I tell people that story is like, don't be anchored in the current price. Look at the opportunity. And the fact that, you know, gold is what, 10 times or something like that?

the cap of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is so much more usable. I mean, there's so much, we have so long to go, I think, before we see this thing top out. Oh my God, I completely agree. The thing that I've heard of illustrate to people is that we are still unbelievably early. Like the name

has recognition globally, but if you ask anybody little details about it, if I walk into a room and ask 100 people if they've heard of Bitcoin, most would probably say yes. If I ask them to explain the difficulty adjustment, they've got no clue. They'll look at me like I'm an idiot. Right. There's still that massive asymmetry that we may have had, maybe past even the early adoption in terms like the ANCAPs,

the libertarians, the cypherpunks that really niche that would have gravitated towards it. But just Gen Pop, no, we're still in innovator stage for sure here. Amen. Particularly on the individual level. Beautiful, Andy, this has been fantastic. One, I'm going to now lovingly refer to CrowdHealth as the Silk Road of Healthcare because I think that's fine. I'll take it. I'll do it.

Do it. Yeah. Brase it up. Where can people go to follow you, find your stuff, check all the things out with CrowdHealth. Where should go? Where should people go? Yeah, join CrowdHealth.com. You know, go and follow us on X and we get pretty spicy over there.

So it's entertaining to hear about what's going on with healthcare. And it's at Join Crowd Health. So we'd love for you to join us. Hey, you. Yes, you watching the Bitcoin price movements and the latest exciting news. It's awesome to stay informed. But the real power of Bitcoin comes from taking control. Don't just watch.

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