TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #333: Building beautiful small towns on a Bitcoin Standard with Jaime "the storefront guy"

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Jaime "the storefront guy" to discuss building strong local communities with beautiful aesthetics and sound money. Follow Jaime on twitter Read more about Jaime at The Vertical Sidewalk Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl CrowdHealth

What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce RIP 333, uh-oh, 333, 33 of TFTC. I sat down with Jamie, the storefront guy, to talk about bringing beautiful design to small towns, to strong small towns, and to bring a Bitcoin standard to these small businesses, to these small towns. This was a great conversation. Jamie's from Ecuador. We talked about hyperinflation in Ecuador 20 years ago, what that was like, how the lingering after effects are still there today,

how he's seeing some similar trends here in the U.S. now that he lives here and is paying close attention to. The economy, the monetary system, and the government's reaction to losing control, essentially. I think the shining message here is that we need to bring beauty back to the world and we need more and more people to realize that trying to control complex systems in a top-down fashion is simply untenable in the long run. It does not work.

We need to give power back to individuals and grassroots movements and have these complex systems evolve as they should granularly and locally and letting local decision makers make decisions based off of local information not some people in a stuffy room trying to micromanage things while being completely disconnected from from that information on the ground incredible episode and jamie's doing some incredible things again to make small businesses stronger to make small towns stronger and to do that via good design urban design and incorporating Bitcoin into these local economies. Uh, a lot of, a lot of alpha here. If you're, if you're living in a small town, running a small business and looking to, to make things

better for your, for your town, your particular situation. This was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. Unchained Capital is here to bring you custody solutions, financial services with Bitcoin, right? So they have their two or three multisig vault, which allows you to hold two keys, which means that you have control of your Bitcoin. Unchained holds the third key in the two or three multisig quorum. This is a collaborative custody model and is going to help you eliminate single points of failure. If you have your coins on Coinbase, they came out last week and said, hey, if we go into bankruptcy, they may not be your coins. Unchained is here to make sure that you never are put in that situation because you have control of your Bitcoin by

having two of the three keys. They have a white glove concierge service that's going to take you from zero to having a multi-sig vault set up. Again, you want to eliminate your single points of failure. This collaborative custody model helps you do that. Go check out this concierge service. If you haven't already, it's going to come with multiple video conference calls. It's going to come with hardware wallets. And then at the end, when your vault is set up, they're going to dump a thousand cuck bucks worth of sats into the vault. They just rolled out a new dashboard for anybody taking advantage of their lending services to help you visualize where your collateral is. This is a very helpful tool, a very good UI update, and really highlights how

much Unchain cares about their customers on the lending side specifically. They do not want you to get margin called. They do not want you to lose your sats. So they built this tool to help you better monitor where your loan collateral is and when you need to top it up or pay down your principal to make sure that you do not lose your SATs. So go check out everything they have going on at Unchained.com.

This rope is also brought to you by good friends at Brains. Brains. Brains, the team behind Slush Pool, the oldest mining pool in Bitcoin's existence, and still here to this day, the stalwart of the industry. They're also the team behind Brains OS Plus Firmware. If you have an ASIC that is compatible

with Brains OS Plus Firmware, you should download it and use it because it's going to help you stack more sats because it's going to help you become more efficient and produce more hashes with your ASICs. Yeah, it's as simple as that. You're leaving sats on the table if you're not using Brains OS Plus Firmware

and it's available to you. Go to brains.com, B-R-A-I-I-N-S.com to check out everything they have going on from Slushpool to the firmware. Their blog has incredible information and resources. They're putting out good content on the state of the mining industry and particular nuances that exist. and then they have insights.brains.com I-N-S-I-G-H-T-S dot B-R-A-I-I-N-S dot com where you can get a one stop shop to figure out everything

that's going on in the Bitcoin mining world in terms of hash rate, difficulty, hash price, hash value. They have profitability calculators, cost calculators to help you monitor and plan out your mining operation. Go to brains.com to check out all this. This report was also brought to you by good friends

a hodl hodl hodl hodl is here to bring you a lending service with no kyc no aml it also leverages bitcoin's native multi-sig properties to ensure uh that your bitcoin is not being rehypothecated you put your bitcoin up in a two or three multi-sig escrow account you hold one key your counterparty in the loan holds another key and then hodl hodl holds that third key you do not have control of your bitcoin in this two or three escrow account however since you do have one key you have visibility into the account so that you know if you're paying your your loan back at the end of the day once you do your stats are going to be sent back to you you know they're not moving you know they're not being rehypothecated put your stats up you get stable coins in return

that you can go spend and as long as you're paying that loan back you're going to get your stats back at the end of the day again no kyc no aml go to len.hodlhodl.com to check out this platform also the HODL HODL team is bringing the Baltic Honey Badger Conference back this year. It's going to be beginning of September in Riga, Latvia. I've been before. It's one of the most high signal conferences in the world. It's an incredible event. I highly recommend traveling to. I'll be there this year. I do not have the website off the top of my head. I believe it's BalticHoneyBadgerConference.com. I could be wrong though. I got to double check that. Just search Baltic Honey Badger Conference in your preferred search engine and it should pop up.

So yeah, go check out the lending platform. Go check out Baltic Honey Badger Conference. It's gonna be beginning of September this year, I believe September 3rd through the 6th, if I recall correctly off the top of my head. Last but not least, this rip was brought to you by good friends at CrowdHealth. All right, CrowdHealth is a great way

to, uh, to opt out of the traditional or of the health insurance, uh, industry. If you're not happy, if you're paying high prices for health insurance, crowd health is an alternative way to pay for your, your healthcare. Uh, basically what you do, it's a, it's a crown crowdfunded healthcare platform where you, um, you, you basically pay a monthly, uh, amount depending on what your situation is. If you're single, if you're married, if you've got children, you pay your monthly fee. It goes into a dedicated bank account that you control. You can always take back at the end of the day. And basically, if you ever have a medical expense, you say, hey, I've got to pay this medical expense. You pay the first $500 and then CrowdHealth presents it to the

rest of the community. They say, hey, Marty is looking to pay for this medical expense. Can X number of people throw in Y number of dollars so that we can pay this. They've had 100% of their bills paid to date. They're also incorporating a Bitcoin standard into this. So they're creating a special community for Bitcoiners who would like to pay that monthly fee and put a portion of that fee into Bitcoin month on month so that they're holding Bitcoin alongside cash in their crowd health balance so that they can potentially speculative attack their future health care costs. So if their crowd health is moving to a Bitcoin standard, they want more Bitcoiners to get involved. You're looking for alternatives. If you think you're paying too much for health

care, if you're looking for a provider that is going to actually do what they're supposed to do, which is help you negotiate prices lower. This is what crowd health does. They do it really well. I had Annie Schoonover on the podcast a few weeks ago. You should go listen to that and see exactly what they're doing and how they're incorporating Bitcoin and the success they've had to date at CrowdHealth in terms of lowering people's healthcare costs, their bills, and taking care of the community members within CrowdHealth. Uh, if you go to joincrowdhealth.com slash TFTC, and you're one of the first thousand to sign up for this, uh, this special offer, you're going to get a hundred dollars as your baseline fee for the first six months, which is an incredible deal. So I'm, I'm using this product. Uh, I, I, I am personally not happy with paying the high prices that I do for health insurance, uh, via the U.S. government via healthcare.gov, I have decided to join the CrowdHealth community because I think

what they're doing in terms of actually standing up for their users and helping to negotiate prices down and having a lower monthly cost for my healthcare, my family's healthcare specifically, is much better aligned with the values that I have. And then on top of that, again, I love the ability to actually be able to, if for whatever reason in the future, I decide CrowdHealth isn't the best for me. I have that dedicated bank account that is mine. I can take that money and that Bitcoin. Once the Bitcoin products rolled out on August 1st with me, it's not just held in this black box and set on fire immediately the way it works with typical insurance companies right now. I have control over the money that I'm dedicating to my healthcare over the long term,

which is a beautiful thing. Again, if you were interested in this and you want to opt out of the health insurance scam that's going on, CrowdHealth is a great way to do that. Join crowdhealth.com slash TFTC. We're going to put it in the show notes is the link that you follow

if you want to join the Bitcoin community there. And again, first thousand users, first thousand freaks that subscribe using that code are going to get $100 a month for the first six months as their fee. So go check it out. Enjoy this episode with Jamie. It was an incredible one.

Important discussion. You need to bring back sound money, beauty, and strong towns to the world. We're going to do it, freaks. It's going to be hard work. It's going to be some hard times. But we're highlighting problems, describing solutions.

We have the tools at our hand. It's just you got to get up off the couch, get up out of bed, get up off your ass, and get it done. Jamie's getting it done. I think you guys are going to love this rip. Enjoy it. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping

over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Bent back in the studio. Beautiful Monday afternoon now here in Texas, in Austin, Texas. I'm sitting down with Jamie, the storefront guy, to dive into a topic that we've hit on a few times throughout the years year but i'm very excited to hit it on again today because this is just one that fascinates me this is the concept of urban development and how we build small strong towns and jamie what

you're doing uh with your storefront design to bring beautiful aesthetics that turn into higher revenue for companies i think is super interesting so thank you for joining us today thank you it's a great pleasure to be here oh well uh let's jump into we were just talking about like revenue per square foot uh that i was we were essentially recording a podcast before we hit record as typically happens with these uh these shows but we were talking about chuck marone strong towns and the concept of revenue per square foot and how it's a bit counterintuitive you think big box stores like walmart would be much more profitable but it turns out the small business is actually has an advantage in terms of revenue per square foot because of what they're able to do

in terms of utilization of their space and turning that into profits. Yeah, and the genesis of the whole thing is zoning, right? So you have these incredibly huge areas where the Walmarts and different big box stores are located in the suburbs or may not even be in the suburbs, maybe within the city limits.

And they get all sorts of subsidies and gifts and tax breaks and things that are even compounding more than the cost per square foot, which is, I mean, it's staggering when you think of it. Yeah. So how did you get into this whole area

of urban development and specifically helping small businesses create aesthetic experiences that will drive foot traffic and therefore revenue? Yeah, so I'm a trained architect. I'm a non-practicing architect, but trained as one. And I had a terribly long academic career for like 11 years. And eventually

I went into urban development and I was working with very small towns in the coast and the jungle back home in Ecuador, where I'm from. And my family eventually opened a small business and I got very deep into it to design it, to understand how it works and how the workings of the small business would manifest in the design. And it just started being an interest of mine. And then about five years ago, I moved to the US and I, of course, I came and didn't have a job and said, okay, I'm going to create my own job. And I thought, what can I do?

What can I teach? and turns out that the knowledge about storefronts and how to design very appropriate places for small businesses was uh was an interesting skill so i just went head on into it um wrote a book about storefront design and that's that that's been my practice for the past four years more or so what are the basics of your design approaches when it comes to helping a small business create more foot traffic what are maybe a good place to start is like what do small businesses typically do wrong what are they overlooking and how can a properly designed storefront drive revenues i guess the first thing that is not overlooked but it's looked at too much maybe is that we need

money to have an amazing storefront. My whole idea is that the knowledge that the merchants and the makers and the business owners have about their business, about their tribe, about their community, about their context, the neighborhood, that's going to be enough knowledge for them to translate into a fantastic storefront design. And my thing is providing them with the tools. So it's essentially a set of tools that they can use themselves to create their own designs. I am there if they want me to, but I trust their knowledge to be able to do it themselves. So that's, I guess, the main thing. People see it as something you achieve with money and they see it as something you achieve with passion for what you do. You just translate it.

And so what are some of the low-hanging fruits that small business owners can do to help because i was explaining to you like my parents own a coffee shop in a small town and so whenever i see uh things that you're posting i'm always like sending it to my mom and dad like hey think of this think of this uh they actually had an interesting thing in terms of like storefront aesthetics there was a campaign in our town to get artists to do like stencil drawings on the windows to make them prettier and drive people in like good like landscape um drawings that that looked really cool and made it seem like you were supporting local artists in the community that's probably one of the the lowest hanging fruits just uh anything you can do to drive

attention towards the window towards the door that is going to get you more people through the door and that's that's a huge thing the the huge the first huge thing that i recommend always is to look at your sidewalk look at where you are and bring a little bit of the store outside, create a table that has, I don't know, books, publications, plants, a little bit, gifts, sweets for the kids or whatever, that people can interact with your brand. And people interacting with the brand, it means you're building something much more than a transaction. You're building a community. You're putting something out there that people will relate to later without even needing to purchase something from you.

So that creates a strong following base that creates strong community. And having a strong community is what, for example, if government comes back and closes all the stores again, they will have their following and the following will be eager to keep patronizing them in different ways. So building that engagement in different ways than just a transaction, that's a good one. Yeah, that's an interesting topic you bring up is the forced lockdowns of all these small businesses. What was your perspective on that and having a sort of finger on the pulse of small business industry? What did you see in terms of the effect that the lockdowns had on these small businesses? So it was absolutely devastating for the morale, I guess, of local businesses to see Target and Walmart open. I don't know if I can say the names of the stores in your show.

Yeah, you can. And as essential businesses and mom and pop convenience stores closed as non-essential businesses, it was super hard on them. and the morale. They were really hit. It was a low blow. And so they were looking at a very, very long tunnel of reopening because we thought it was just going to be two weeks. And then the two weeks turned into two years.

So I went in and designed a tool to help them reopen. And the whole idea was reconnect with your initial passion, your initial inspiration to open your business and reopen it as something stronger and think about different channels, think about how to build a community. So whenever something like this happens again, which may happen tomorrow,

government may decide that non-essential businesses are being too tough on the environment or the climate and that closes up again. So they need to have other channels of communication and they need to have open channels and free channels of communication with, with their, with their customers so they can keep selling. So that was, that was the thing that, that, uh, struck me as, as, as saddest was the, the morale that was hit really, really hard.

And of course they had to, they had to put all their attention and energy in, in, in compliance with all these loans, the PPP loans and, uh, and the, the, the reopening schemes. And of course, still payroll and taxes and and mortgages and all these things that are that are on the on the back office i guess so that giving them something for the front office that they could look at giving them something that their customers can could relate to and and and be happy while relating to that was a big light at the end of the tunnel yeah it was really messed up that the government sort of picked favorites and allowed those big box stores to stay open and really i mean large number of small businesses were forced to shut down throughout all this and i think

the discarding of small businesses particularly which is the backbone of the american economy is the entrepreneur in a local town supporting their community giving it life like how how imperative are small businesses to a well-functioning society, in your opinion? Especially in smaller towns, they are what happens in small towns because the communities, the local economy is going to be modest. It's not going to be New York City type of economy of billions and trillions of dollars. It's going to be a modest economy. So having these modest businesses that are working honestly to really bake a few cakes um i don't know fix a few pipes and things like that those are the real businesses that are the backbones of the of the of the

community so it's it's very important that that we allow them to stay open which is very different than helping them be open right so on the one hand we are giving them all sorts of facilities and and earmarking money in Congress for huge grants for small businesses. And on the other hand, we're saying, okay, you can only open your business if it has a space minimum of 5,000 square feet. And you go to the town and you're looking for something because your operation would be, your budget and your operation can function in 600 square feet. But then the minimum of the town is 2500 you're really not going to find anything there and towns that do not accommodate the tiniest of the tiny entrepreneurs those are the ones that are not

that are they are encouraging the walmart's and targets of the world so i mean you mentioned zoning earlier is that what comes into this is zoning and um sort of the specs that local government forces on? It does. It does. I think most of the decline and struggle that we have in local economies in this country is because of regulation. It's because we have regulated ourselves to death. And we have looked at times of incredible creation of wealth, like the 50s, you know, Rossville towns, now Rossville, then super wealthy towns that have these amazing industries that were growing exponentially. And we try to regulate our towns as if that growth would be infinite and infinite both in growth and in time. So right now we think stop working

as the way we want, and factories move out, jobs are lost, and the regulatory frameworks of those economies are created to support the Firestone factory, created to support the GM factory. If the GM factory moves to China, we are left with these incredibly heavy, burdensome packages of regulations that any small town any small business that wants to move into town to start can't because the regulation is made for a giant yeah or and by the giant which is even worse no and it's especially like the con like putting it in the context of all these large factories that america thrived on 70 years ago and pushing that overseas like which bitcoiners would argue

is driven by triffin's dilemma where you take us off the gold standard you try to make the u.s reserve currency of the world the best way to do that is to shift your manufacturing overseas to compound that what i would deem to be a mistake with a another regulatory mistake which is just keeping the same regulations and forcing it on small businesses is incredibly asinine it seems like america uh certainly more recently but slowly but surely over the last 50 60 years has just been shooting the longevity of the country and the vitality of the country in the long run in the foot correct because i think i think it's all about what's uh the the generational exchange, I guess we can say that, right? So businesses that reach some sort of maturity

and are big, but they are not gigantic. And workers from those businesses can create some offshoots. And those offshoots start to become wealthier and become richer and become bigger. And things start growing gently, right? And accommodating more people and accommodating new ideas and accommodating things that are not not necessarily trying to replace what came before but built up on what came before and so if we if we switch everything and just look at the how to manage bigness as opposed to how to motivate smallness to grow big that is when we you know start losing the start losing the track and it's it's it's very hard it's very hard to see that most opportunities start in in in in big places and the small places really are struggling and

are declining day by day and and there's no there's no interest on on investing in these places and even when government tries to invest in these places they are it's just it ends up being misallocation of resources because any decision that government can make any plan that government can make if there is not a very strong following of different individuals with different motivations and different interests that take on this and build up from this nothing will happen eventually money will run out and the investments will stop and nothing will have happened yeah so if you had a magic wand what would your prescription be to this this over regulatory problem is it as simple as like stop regulating just throw out all the zoning regulations and

and let let the market figure it out or is there again going back to low-hanging fruits like are there things that small towns can begin doing um in a very straightforward fashion that would create a condition where these small businesses can begin to thrive Correct. So I guess, I mean, if you follow my Twitter account, you'll probably have found a few tweets that say, dump the zoning code. But I don't think it's that easy to just get rid of an entire regulatory framework that a city has been functioning in. But because it entails, you know, changing the entire structure of government and changing and those types of hard changes end up being very burdensome on families and small businesses. And we don't want that. So I guess small things that they could do is, for example, eliminate parking requirements, give some sort of or look at the strong towns idea of revenue per square foot and create policy looking at that revenue per square foot and thinking that a little coffee shop in the middle of downtown paying more per square feet than a huge Walmart. in the edge of town is not only unjust, but it is not conducive to a startup economy,

not conducive to an economy that is motivating new ideas to come to town and start building up in town. So one thing that I would do is, for example, I would defer property taxes literally to zero if there are makers craftsmen artisans that are coming into town and creating live work spaces in main street so what is it how would you define a live work space live work space is essentially a small commercial space downstairs that can be a manufacturing uh uh manufacturing company, it could be, I don't know, a design studio, anything that craftsmen, makers, or creative people, basically, artists can put on. And then they would live on the same building on the second floor or in a unit in the back.

So it's a small building that accommodates living spaces and commercial spaces for the people living in those quarters. So those are usually things that, number one, they have allowed economies that are coming back from the brink of destruction to be able to start very small outfits, very small outfits that are operated by the owner in a very, very modest way and can eventually grow. And I'm thinking of two examples. Number one is Bilnius in Lithuania after the Soviet Union collapsed, thankfully, they were, um, there was a, um, a neighborhood in the city of Vilnius, which is called, uh, Užupis, where artists had colonized it. They actually created the Republic of Užupis. And when you went in, they gave you a pass, a passport that you, you

know, um, stamped in a different artist, uh, uh, artist owned galleries, which were nothing more than places that they have swept and hung their art. That was it. It was very precarious, but it was great for them to start showcasing their things. They didn't need to apply for lengthy permits and pay for licenses and stuff like that. It was something very organic

that allowed them to get a first foot on the door of the market, basically. And also the second example is in Cuba, in Havana. This is a city that has been in decline for 65 years almost, 62 years. And things were being super tight a couple of years ago. And then they opened for small restaurants and beauty salons that people could install in their houses. And the boom was incredible. So many people were opening places and they were using their creativity to dress them as fantastic windows.

And you went in and they had amazing food, homemade food. And you go into the beauty salons and they are absolutely makeshift, but they were good craftsmen. They're very, very, very able and doing great work. So things started consolidating. And this was a very tiny glimpse of sovereignty that they could have. They took it immediately and things started turning around. People could see things starting to turn around, which is even better because the perception of things turning around is going to bring more people to work towards the turnaround. So that's something I would do. I would try to directly eliminate most of the licenses that cities are requiring for small craftsmen and very, very small businesses like beauty salons or nail shops. Small services like plumbers and stonemasons, craftsmen of all types, tiny manufacturing things that can, I don't know, somebody with a 3D printer can install there and, I don't know, sell parts for cars, 3D printed parts for cars or whatever. so anything that can that can take the red tape and can take the burden out of people operating at the minimum possible scale that would probably be a huge help for most of the struggling economies

around yeah and you touched on something very interesting there which is the the perception of a turnaround and people actually seeing visually a turnaround via good aesthetics via good design and stuff that has a profound effect so there's like a psychological aspect to this too right when you hit like a tipping point where you see a glimmer of hope like you said in havana and in lithuania like it just starts with a very small community making small changes but the other people in community can see that and say all right maybe there is a turnaround i'll contribute to that and it goes both ways so when people perceive the turnaround they're going to be happy to contribute, when people perceive the decline, they'll be very happy to stop contributing.

So you'll have, you know, you're declining societies and you're ascending societies. I think Balaji Srinivasan mentions this a lot, the ascending and descending societies. This is, it's very important because you see that small things and small changes that make people people perceive about the the turnarounds it will it will they will start contributing and things get things get better really fast yeah i mean especially here in the united states it definitely right now with everything going on in the world and coming out of lockdowns it seems like just across the country many parts most parts many would argue that we're in a descending state and so that's the one thing i think about often and why i focus on on bitcoin a lot is like

how do you stop that degradation and begin to turn it into an ascending uh community correct and and i am a strong believer that especially for these struggling economies thinking about sound money thinking about the uh everything that's entailed in a bitcoin standard the fact that you have to percent proof of work, the fact that you cannot extend beyond what you actually can do and prove that you can do, it will teach a ton of lessons. And also the technology that's overlying these things. So for example, right now for merchants, I'm working with a town that has so few stores have e-commerce platforms because it's very expensive for them to use credit cards, for example. And now you're thinking about Lightning Network, where they could have transactions that

are costing less than a cent, as opposed to 3%, 4%, or 5% that is being charged by different payments options. I think it could be amazing and open incredible doors of opportunities for small towns to start thinking about these things yeah and so how because that's why i love following you because you're doing this really cool stuff on the urban development side of things and then you're a bitcoiner as well and have been for a while and you're thinking about how to implement this into what you're doing in terms of helping small businesses and communities and that's something that we've been beating the drum on here for quite some time is like well it's nice that countries like El Salvador are making Bitcoin legal tender

and it's getting adoption by publicly traded companies. If this is really going to succeed, it needs to be grassroots at the small local community level. And you are thinking not only how to build strong small communities and businesses, but how to implement a Bitcoin standard into those businesses. Exactly. I think it's a huge task. It's a huge task because you not only need to talk to them about the technology and how the technology can help, but also to the entire mindset that requires someone to adopt in order to understand these things.

It's very, if you think about it, it's not counterintuitive. The fiat standard is more counterintuitive. But since that's what we are, the Bitcoin standard starts to be counterintuitive and it's hard to talk to people about it. I had an episode yesterday in which I offered to buy a beer to someone who has a very ample platform talking about urbanism and how to create better cities. and he was deriding, of course, as many people are, deriding Bitcoin online. So I said, dude, I'll buy you a beer. And if I don't make sense by the time I'm done,

I'll buy you a second beer. And his reply was, I don't drink beer and I'm better off doing something else. So and I'm thinking, okay, so we have a ton of urban activists who talk about helping small businesses and talk about helping struggling local economies and go super deep and put tremendous amount of work

in creating documents that are making diagnostics of this is what happened in this economy. This is what happened with this town. This is what we should do with this other town. And they are not looking, I guess, at the bigger picture of there are some things happening now which have not happened for probably 500 years. The convergence of things that we have now of external burdens and beliefs that I'm going to say some people are more passionate than others with beliefs. And the convergence of events and conditions, I guess, hasn't happened since probably five or six hundred years ago. And right now we are at the verge of this incredible revolution.

And I am an avid reader of Hoppe. And he wrote a little book called A Brief History of Man. And one thing he says there is that most of the significant revolutions that men has had have not been technical revolutions, but they have been cognitive revolutions. So think about the agricultural revolution. If you read a standard book, it will say that the agricultural revolution came when men started, you know, cultivating crops. The urban revolution started when man started building cities. And Hoppe comes and says, no, this is not when the revolution started. These are processes that could have stopped at any time, except man looked at the crops and said,

ooh, if I grow these crops and I trade these crops and I build a shed to keep the crops for longer, my species will be able to reproduce and be stronger for a longer time. That is when the revolution sets. The urban revolution, it's not just man building cities, but man looking at the city and saying, in this city, I can build a bank. In this city, I can build a hospital. In this city, I can, I don't know, build a temple. And this is when man realizes that building cities

can be something that projects the species in thousands of years in the future. And that's the real revolution. So this is where we are now. Every day you see something new that's happening in the technology bitcoin even you know web 3 and and crypto and things every day there's something new but until we have the cognitive leap that says this is why we are doing this that's what is that that's when it will catch on what do you think we need to get to that cognitive leap i think

I have my I mean I think there's also like natural processes happening in the traditional system with inflation hitting consistent highs month in a month out the supply shortages due to the economic lockdowns and the disruptions to the supply chains that they brought with it and the fact that we have a president who cannot speak and seems to be going through a very obvious degenerative the mental decline i think we're reaching a i could be wrong but it just feels like the combination of everything in terms of like energy shortages food shortages inflation uh it seems like we have a leader that isn't very strong or mentally capable of leading is going to force people to ask how did it get this bad and what is how can we prevent this in the future and

And then Bitcoin's waiting there like, we need to fix the money. I think you're right. I think Bitcoin will be waiting there when things really collapse. But it's very hard to grasp the collapse. Having had the opportunity to have family in different places that have seen collapse, very, truly horrible collapses. I'm talking about Eastern Europe, some economies in Latin America that have been destroyed completely. You don't really grasp the nature and extent of the collapse. So when things happen, you open the paper.

Right now, you open your iPad and you read that day's news. And so, I don't know, inflation is 51%. You're like, oh, inflation, this is really bad. okay, let's go to the store. Yeah, I don't know. Hamburgers are twice as expensive today than they were yesterday. Yes, bummer. Let's go have a hamburger. So you really don't grasp the nature and extent of the collapse until it's too late. This is also what Chuck Maron says. It's going to collapse gradually and then suddenly. But the suddenly, it's just a horrible thing that I don't wish on anyone. My country went through one of those. It was brutal. Still, there's effects to

this day, over 20 years after the collapse, still things are happening today that are direct effects from that collapse. And I don't think it's enough to build a strong enough Bitcoin environment that we'll be waiting for the collapse. I think we need the 95 Theses of Luther. We need the moment in which someone really says something that will click and it will make a click on millions of people that have been huddling for over a decade now. And they say, yes, that's what it is. that's what it is and and now i'm going to i guess only sell my meat with bitcoin i'm only going to accept payments in bitcoin i'm only i'm not going to accept fiat money i'm um governments are going it will be a domino effect but we need the spark yeah we just spark yeah and you can't predict the

spark you'll just know when you see it correct you can't predict it yeah we're gonna be waiting though we have to keep building the environment we have to keep you know making bitcoin stronger and and and uh i don't like the word but evangelizing about bitcoin and and and telling everyone you can't and orange filling as many people as you can because it i especially if you truly believe in it especially if you truly believe that it is it is an entire change of mentality it's uh it's it's one of those cognitive revolution moments when when people really realize what what bitcoin is is about and the more people we we we help realize that it's going to make it easier and there's going to be more people working and then more chances that the spark will come

so how did you personally come to realize it what was it for you well for me was 2011 i purchased into mount gox and then yeah so i i think it was like a hundred bucks a pop which would have been fantastic these days but anyway um so i'm gonna say i lost like a thousand bucks i'm not gonna say i lost like you know three million dollars but um so it it's a low realization when, not because of Bitcoin, interestingly. It's not because of Bitcoin, but because, I guess, of studying economics. I have a very good friend and mentor who is, he's younger than I am, a little bit younger than I am, but he's a good friend and mentor. and he is a very staunch austrian economist and so getting to read things that he feeds me and

getting to to realize things not because he's saying these things but along the readings that i get to do uh it it was it was a slow thing that i guess from probably from 2010 to 2014 it was all about you know changing opinions and and moving up and down on the scale of i guess going from the left to the center to the right to everywhere and then say oh it's none of these things. It's none of these things. And it's all about common sense. It's all about freedom. It's all about letting people do their thing and not raising an army to force them to do my thing. And Bitcoin just fits perfectly on that. And then you start realizing the other things that are very similar. So you look at how the Bitcoin code may be changed, that anybody can propose a

change. And if that change is not taken by the community, it will not happen. And the process for it to be taken by the community is, I guess, if you look from outside, it's a very streamlined process. But if you look from inside, it's a very tough process. It's a very stressful process that is very similar to how cities were built in the beginning. It's very similar to what happened in the 20th century when people started saying, hey, the way that we have been building cities for 8 000 years or 10 000 years was wrong we have to build cities like this guy is saying with the economy the same thing happened what was this what was that particular what was that that change in city design the city design change was modernism there's a document called

the Charter of Athens, which is a document that an architect called Le Corbusier produced while in a cruise from, I think it was from Marseille to Athens. He brought a few of his modern architect friends. And this was a trend that was going up, but modernism at that time was still retaining all the the the human part of of architecture so yes it was based on industry it was based on innovation it was based on things that were changing and happening at the time but still it was very human-centered right so there comes this guy who gets together with his band of friends and takes a cruise and uh writes this new book saying everything that came before was wrong. And we need to build these types of buildings and these types of cities.

And I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt of thinking that he really wanted to solve some of the problems that cities were having. And these were pollution and uncomfortable quarters for immigrants and tenements for workers. It was really cities were not very nice but they were coming around they just wanted a leap instead of a process and they staunchly believed that changing the way we build cities would have no effect on the way we use cities so that these new shiny plastic cities would be great for everyone Turns out they weren't. And academia very gladly adopted these ideas. So everything that you study right now when you go to architecture school is going to be modernism. There's even schools that don't even go into the classical and Roman and Renaissance architecture because it's just not worth it for them. Because the important part is the creativity and how we create something that has never

been seen before. And it's just the same thing happened with the economy. We are going to create something that has never been seen before, that can be managed from a central bank, from a guy in a suit sitting somewhere in a dark office on top of a penthouse looking overlooking the city. And he has a lever that he pulls and things happen as he pulls the lever. And nutrition is the same. If you look at how we are fed at this time, what is allowed, what is not allowed, what is pushed, what is recommended, what is not recommended, what is forbidden even, it's the same thing.

So look at almost any area of human action at this point. And starting after World War I, we moved into this centrally planned, expert-based standard in which someone knows better and that someone's going to tell you what to do. So disregard the way we've been building cities for 8,000 years. This is a better way. Even though when you build those cities, you are effectively destroying small businesses, you're effectively destroying the tinier moving parts of the economy that are the actual supporting parts of the economy. And you're just obliterating all sorts of tiny components that cities should have and must have to be able to keep growing. so I mean if you have a slime mold and you see the slime mold growing and you put the slime mold in a petri dish and you just keep the petri dish the slime mold will grow to a point

and no more because it's confined and this is what we have done to cities and yes I am comparing cities to slime mold because it's the same if you look at the if you look at experiments that they have done a fantastic book by stephen johnson called emergence where he compares cities to uh ant colonies and uh and slime mold and it's it's super interesting and they they made uh an experiment in japan where they let the slime mold grow and find the best routes for trains in the Tokyo region. And really the slime mold came to the same conclusions as the best Japanese engineers, which is super interesting. So it's not that slime mold is as intelligent as we are, but that we don't need to be any more intelligent than slime mold to be

able to create fantastic places and fantastic cities. So there comes the experts that say, no, no, no, no, no. This is not the way we should do this. There is a new way. And I will give you a very shiny, very bright, very beautiful new city that you will be happy on. But it turns out this is absolutely arbitrary and is not following a normal human continuum of evolution. And it's just horrible. It's just horrible. That's terrible. No, it seems like every practice, every domain has its canes coming from it.

Yes, absolutely. When it comes to an aha moment, like a cognitive change, it's like, again, it's something I try to do here on this podcast and the newsletter is just try to put it in like a one sentence, what you just described.

What is the problem with architecture, urban design, food, money? It is central planners trying to control emergent systems. We just need to get the idea and embed the idea that complex systems are emergent.

It can never be micromanaged in a top-down fashion with long-term success. And just get the idea of central planning out of the minds of the masses. Just notice that these systems are complex, complex systems

due to their nature that at the end of the day human interaction is very similar to slime mold in terms of how it plays out if it's going to be allowed to play out and you can't control that at the end of the day unless if you want good results correct and i think that the convergence will be interesting because things are slowly converging and and people will be forced badly to acknowledge these things so Essentially, when the supply chain gets really problematic and you are forced to go to the farmer to try to purchase meat and milk and go to the source and have an urgent need to understand how it works and that it's not something that the supermarket presses a button and milk and eggs appear. so you'll be able to you'll be forced to to to to understand these things and then whenever there's

the housing shortage gets really really bad and we look at so many beautiful structures buildings that we have everywhere in the country that are just sitting there waiting for someone and it's not like you you know do like this and and and and beautiful buildings start appearing no beautiful buildings take a long time and a lot of work, but they are just sitting there and somebody will be forced to say, okay, my only chance is to go and fix that building myself. And my only chance is going to be ride a bike to the farm to purchase meat. And then suddenly the stonemason is going to say, yeah, I'll help you, but you can only pay me in Bitcoin. The farmer is going to say, yeah i'll sell you to me but you can only pay me in bitcoin because you know our green things are

going to be not very worthy so uh i think that the convergence is going to force a lot of people to to to understand when there's when there's more than one thing that requires that cognitive leap that that's that's going to be that's going to be dawning on many people yeah that's why i like to see things like the beef initiative down here in texas where um slim and cole bolton who owns the ranch here in austin right but i already buy meat directly from my rancher with bitcoin um and it's good to see these operators front running front running this right and that's what like my dad my parents are going to open up another coffee shop uh in a small vacation island down the shore and my dad is telling me like yeah

we're putting all the cash directly into Bitcoin we're going to try to accept it we're not going to force people to pay for it but we're going to be rotating our reserves into Bitcoin throughout the summer and it is a small excuse me

slowly and then suddenly yes and if you're a first mover you're going to have a large advantage because if you think of this like everybody's gonna so you mentioned so you grew up in ecuador correct i did and they had a a crisis 20 years ago what was and you were saying it was terrible and the after effects are still being felt to this day there's some lingering after effects what is it like and how important

is it that people understand that the suddenly part is not fun it's it's it was it was really hard. So it's textbook inflation. The government had no, I mean, the only idea of government trying to do stuff was printing more money. So you will see that everything that I say is going to resonate with things that are happening now. So the only thing that government could see itself doing was printing more money and also growing in different programs and and and the budget was growing so they really needed to print more money the exchange rate with the us dollar when the the first i remember was a huge thing it was a dark moment when it passed 99 at At that point, Sucres was the currency name and became 100.

So you stop seeing two numbers, 99, and you start seeing three numbers, you know, 100. This is something devastating for the morale of the people. And that started just going up and up and up and up and up. And the only response of government was trying to help more. And government helping more means government printing more. And at some point, it was completely untenable. At some point, it got absolutely impossible to manage. And inflation just, not inflation, but the price increase started to be uncontrollable.

And it went from probably less than 1,000 sucres for $1, all the way up to 25,000 sucres for $1. And this was, yes, and this was in the process of less than a year. OK? So if you wanted to purchase a half liter bottle of Coke, which was 50 sucres at some point, eventually that started to be $2,000, $2,500. And of course, wages could not keep up. You could raise wages. You could raise wages, I don't know, 10%, 15%, which is a lot.

You could raise wages 15%. But then the inflation was 2000. I don't think we reached 2000, but it was probably 200. And that was just absolutely devastating. And what happened is the economy was closed. the government decided to put a corral on the banks so every bank was closed okay we did not have something like the fdic insurance so with the closed banks you could not come to the office because it was closed you could not go to the atm because it was closed you could not get your money And they closed the banks. At that point, many people had accounts in U.S. dollars. They froze everybody's accounts and changed those U.S. dollars to sucres. the official exchange rate i'm gonna say was probably 5 000 but the new official rate was 25 000 and whenever they made the change they made the change at peanuts so people who had

a hundred thousand dollars in the bank which was i'm gonna say five million sucres at that point had the same 5 million sucres, but it was now $10,000. And you could not get them out. This was a process of, I don't know how many days or weeks in which you could not access your money. So nobody could make payments. If you had a business, you could not pay your employees. You could not pay your rent.

You could not pay your providers, nothing. The providers also didn't have money to pay their people or their providers even. So it was a complete stop of the economy. And whenever they opened, of course, there were the people lining the banks to making huge lines around the banks to try to get some of their money.

It was just devastating. People committed suicide. People died because there was the inability to access medical care because there was no money. It was devastating. And then, of course, when they opened, nobody wanted those sucres anymore. So everybody was rushing to buy U.S. dollars. And then the new exchange rate, of course, blew up.

This was the black market, blew up. So nobody wanted sucres until eventually nobody was spending anything. The economy was not closed still, but it was not moving because nobody wanted, nobody felt sure enough to spend in anything. And the only resource that the government had was to basically shut the currency and exchange everything into U.S. dollars. So as of today, 23 years after, Ecuador does not have its own currency. It has the U.S. dollar as its currency. Yeah. And so for 23 years, we've had inflation of 3% because the government cannot get more US dollars than the government can get. They cannot print any US dollars. So they only have what they have. That's it. they have what they have from taxes they have what they have from petroleum sales because petroleum

is is is national so that's what they have that's it they cannot spend a dime more if they do it's debt yeah the uh so i used to work for a software sales company we would sell uh i would sell um developer talent obviously creative remote teams based out of quito and quiet kill um in ecuador and so like a lot of my co-workers were Ecuadorian and they would tell me stories about the state of the country but it seemed like at that

this was like 2014 2015 that was boom yeah so there was like a vibrant tech scene super vibrant yeah because petroleum was like 150 bucks and the government was getting all that money

this was in the space of 10 years they got more money than the previous, I think, like 50 or 60 years. So they were able to do a lot of stuff. But then again, it was mostly government initiatives. So when the money ran out, there was no more money to keep feeding or fueling those initiatives. And there was no, they didn't put any, they didn't rely enough in the private sector that the private sector could take over and keep building so right now it's it was hit pretty

hard by the pandemic yeah at the time my co-workers weren't very fond of correa as president probably not but they were probably making a killing yeah all of us were no it's fascinating it's fascinating how much fucking up the money can fuck up a society oh yeah absolutely absolutely i mean my my own family my my uncle sold a he's a he's a cheesemaker he was a cheesemaker he sold his uh his cheese factory and he was unable to retrieve the money from the cheese factory because they basically he got i don't know maybe a tenth of the money so he couldn't he was keeping it to invest in something else couldn't do it yeah so it's just devastating i mean this highlights the utility of bitcoin in many aspects it's scarce 21 million so your savings in terms of your share of

the overall bitcoin pie is never going to be uh debased uh you actually control if you control your keys the bank's not going to be able to freeze your funds and not allow you to access them and and so i'd be interested to speak to in terms from the small business perspective like what can holding business on the balance sheet allow small businesses and small towns to do you just mentioned your uncle wanted to reinvest i mean imagine yes a small business putting a portion of their balance sheet into bitcoin and what that can do for them moving forward i think for the for the very small businesses changing their balance sheets or at least some of the balance sheets. At this point, it's probably a risky operation, just because we

still are seeing a lot of volatility in terms of US dollars. If we look at the volatility of the US dollar, that's a different story. But at this point, you see the volatility next to the unit of account, which is the US dollar. So that's the thing. If the unit of account is not Bitcoin, then you will see too much volatility. And then small businesses that may need those funds soon for, I don't know, just making payments or supplying for their broken supply chains or whatever, it's probably in a different place. The way I see it is the technology that can help tremendously, technology especially with Lightning and payments and the way for small businesses to circumvent the high prices of banking and credit cards at this point.

And then for the towns, for the small towns and for local economies that may or may not be struggling, I think that's where the key lies. So I'm thinking bonds. So some people invest in, some people believe enough in the changes that a town is doing to invest in a bond This is a private Bitcoin bond created by a local government or an agency people invest in this bond against the return that the work that the town is doing will produce in the future so towns will have to get really busy by showing proof of work so you will need to put on the work to show that you are bringing people that you are bringing businesses that you

are becoming this labor hub that will attract more people and will attract more innovative people that will create more things and will be able to lift the local economy to a certain point when local artists, for example, will be able to sell their art for much more than they are doing now. Local musicians will fill up arenas, unlike they are doing now. Local makers will have large operations, unlike the tiny garage operations that they have now. And if you invest in these bonds, the return that the town will have will be great, and the investors will be able to get some of that. So I see schemes that are, sometimes I see they are like shit coin type of thing. And sometimes I see that they are much more, or they could be much more serious than they really are, like city coins. I try not to pay attention on the struggle of you're either a shit coin or you're promising Bitcoin yields or whatever.

But the figure of a local Bitcoin, let's say, local Bitcoin bond that gets put out there for investors who believe in towns enough to put their money there and then collect when those towns turn around and grow. So I think that's probably, probably still remains to be seen, but probably one of the tools that could be harnessed to help local economies. I think that some, I believe somewhere in Nebraska or somewhere, one of the little towns is putting local art on NFTs. and by putting this local art on nfts they are actually selling rights to local public arts to murals to sculptures whatever and when those local economies turn around and they get admission worthy so that people can actually charge for those murals to be seen and charge for those sculptures to be experienced, then those bonds will gain in value more than just the value of the currency they're on. So more than just the price of Bitcoin, but the value of the bonds,

because the art is growing, the artist is growing at a pace that eventually makes them mission worthy. So there's tons of angles we can take on right now. Everything is hypothetical still but i think we're very close to someone actually you know uh putting something into work yeah it's our job no i haven't i i was talking about this with safety in a couple weeks ago where i envision i'm big in the mining space i have a couple of mining operations myself that i'm involved with and for years i've been thinking that there needs to be a bitcoin permanent fund mining permanent fund specifically so like what i think is like if you're a small county or small town that has like excess electricity at a power station at a utility

provider or you have stranded let's say natural gas assets in the county that don't have pipeline connectivity you issue a muni bond where you go raise let's say 10 million dollars uh in a bond you do a 10 million dollar bond offering over 10 year period 15 year period maybe you make it a long duration. You get that cash and you buy a bunch of ASICs and you partner with a mining company to come in. You say, hey, we're going to give you the ASICs coming to mine on this excess electricity. And then we're going to roll that revenue back into the bond, but also into a fund that will support the local economy. I think to me, that's the lowest hanging fruit. It's like, all right, where's the excess electricity or excess energy? Let's issue a bond, a muni bond

for that with the intent purpose of leveraging that excess or stranded asset to mine Bitcoin. And a tiny percentage of that bond could actually go to, like you say, helping the local economy. What if we bring, I don't know, a thousand Bitcoiners into a town? Move in, pick a building, fix the building, put your operation there. Can you imagine what I call crowdsourcing? You just bring a crowd that will create an immense collective brain in that town. The things that will happen in that town, the ideas that will be exchanged, the efforts, the collaboration, the energy and vitality that the Bitcoin space has with a thousand Bitcoiners fixing buildings and opening businesses in that town. Just imagine that.

It would be fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm getting a taste of it here in Austin, Texas. I mean, there's a lot of, it's more focused on people actually building like Bitcoin infrastructure instead of like small town infrastructure. But it does seem like great things are happening here just because you get a bunch of light minded people together to work towards a common goal, which is helping people get to that moment where things flip and they're like, oh, I need to get Bitcoin.

And I think there's a niche also for, to circle back to the first phrases of this episode, is beauty. We still are not in a place where the consideration of beauty is part of the Bitcoin conversation. It's very sparse. You see very few people talking about how beauty will, for example, even mining operations. Mining operations can be amazingly beautiful. Let's build a framing building outside of your big mining operation building, and that building will have a farmer's market. Only those little gestures that can bring people and show people how Bitcoin can power beauty would be amazing and it would be a great example for so many people who are working on the space, dwelling on the space, huddling on the space, and not necessarily putting some of that creativity, understanding, and cognitive leap to work. It would be interesting.

no i completely agree i mean earlier this year we've we've done a big rebrand here at tftc and i changed the tagline we never had a tagline but i made our tagline i guess our mission um is we're a media company focused on bitcoin beauty and freedom in the digital age where i think i think uh beauty i completely agree beauty is important um good aesthetics are important and that's something especially in the urban landscape that's been completely defunct for a while i mean i grew up born and raised in philadelphia in northeast philly where there was not a lot of beauty but philly's a very old town and it's very interesting how you see this intermixing of the 1700s philadelphia that came up during the revolutionary times and you

old city it's very beautiful you have independence mall you have the brick roads you have the core infrastructure of the city that was built hundreds of years ago is very beautiful and then it's just intermixed with a lot of uh fiat architecture and real estate that that is designed i mean the sprawl of philadelphia outside of center city uh within city limits there's just a bunch of shit housing that was only made to last like 30 years that's that's the thing i mean when you are looking at operations that you see have the potential of outliving you, you will build stronger, right? So when everything that I told you about in Ecuador happened, people were just concerned with what they're going to eat tonight. Whereas if you are building something solid that

you can see yourself working in for the rest of your life and your children working on for the rest of their lives, you are going to set some solid bricks and solid bricks bring beauty because that's, it's just a, it's just a matter of thinking. I am building something very strong. This will have to last. The only way that this will last is if people love it and people need to love it. And the only way for them to love it is to make it beautiful. So it comes directly as a direct logic from the low time preference. The lower your time preference, the more beautiful the building is. Let's bring beauty back to the world. Yes. That's my mission. Well, thank you for going on the mission. We need more people like yourself, Jamie. It's dire times. But again,

i'm very optimistic bitcoin makes me very optimistic exactly and uh tomorrow but yes there's optimism there is no and i think about a small town where my parents operate their their coffee shop even though the pandemic was hard for a lot of businesses that we have a very strong small town um and it's cool i moved away 13 years ago now at this point which is hard to believe but obviously i go back visit my parents and hang out and it's really cool what uh the town has done in terms of like building that and focusing on that local economy of

outside of Philadelphia Havertown yeah that's where I'm from I grew up in the northeast we moved to Havertown later but yeah yeah it's a nice strong small town

it's really cool to see what they're doing focusing on the local economy there and And yeah, I want to bring more of it. Again, this design, the small things that you can do with the storefront, the small things you can do by focusing on revenue per square foot, the bigger leaps you can take by saying,

all right, let's take a look at our balance sheet, our income statement and figure out how much we can save in Bitcoin for the long term and begin lowering our time preference to throw gas on the fire of making this even more beautiful, more profitable. That's exactly what we need to do. And like I said, right now it's a risky operation, but if we orange bill enough people,

they will learn to live with that risk. They will learn to love the risk. And the more people we have, the stronger the towns are going to be. Yeah. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Yes. I hope we get to do it again at some point.

I would love to meet in person and talk about this stuff as well. So if you're ever in Austin, please let me know. when i'm back in the northeast i'll be sure to ping you as well please let me know if you're in northeast and i'll i'll be happy to join you where uh where can the freaks are listening let's find out more about what you're doing how can they help your mission to to bring more beautiful storefronts to the world okay so my my my company is called storefront mastery it's a creative agency, which I, which I, you know, used to help small, small businesses, small towns in this, in this mission.

And it's at storefrontmastery.com. So if you, if you go there, you'll find all the, all the links needed to, uh, to find me everywhere in Twitter and, uh, Substack. I keep a Substack, which is called the vertical sidewalk. and I'm playing with the sidewalk being a state of mind. So basically the storefronts that are right to the sidewalk are the vertical part of it. So it's called the vertical sidewalk.

And there I write mostly about storefronts, but I have a section that is about bringing Bitcoin into the urban space. which is uh which is a task so you go to if you go to my website storefrontmastery.com you will find all the links that are you know twitter instagram facebook everything go check it go check it out for each game you're doing very important work thank you it's uh it's gonna make the world a better place i believe in the long run so again thank you for that thank you so much i'm very honored to be here

can't wait to do it again that's all we got this week freaks peace and love