TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #118: Will Reeves

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Will Reeves, Founder of Fold, to discuss: - How Fold has grown from an app that allowed users to purchase pizza via LN to something much bigger - Building a distributed team - Building on a protocol that is changing and evolving - Bridging the gap between non-technical users and cypherpunks - The switch from ad tech to surveillance tech - California wine - much more Follow Will on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wlrvs Check out Fold: https://foldapp.com/ Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Casa. Use promo code “TFTC” to get up to $250 off your Casa membership … or hit their team up [e-mail] for a free demo, or to put them to the test with your hardest OpSec questions! Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty here on a Friday afternoon. Sorry for dropping this episode late today. Had a long morning. Watched an hour-long demo of the Unchained Capital's Caravan product. Dope. Go check that out if you haven't already. Gonna be a game-changer for the multi-sig game. Then I had a dentist appointment. I had to run to a lunch. Now I'm just getting back to my apartment. and finally have time to record these ads and get this episode up. I really like this episode. I had an incredible time earlier this week sitting down with Will Reeves from the Fold team, the founder of Fold.

We had a good time drinking some very, very good mezcal that Will was kind enough to provide for the recording. We waxed poetic for about two hours about Fold, how the app came to be, what it's like building a distributed team, What it's like building on a protocol like Lightning, which isn't fully fleshed out yet, and how you sort of bridge the gap between new users who aren't as technical and the cypherpunks that we hope everybody can be eventually when they are leveraging technology like Bitcoin. I think you guys are really going to like this episode. Will's a great dude. Wound up rapping about wine country by the end of the episode. got pretty cosmic so i think you guys are going to enjoy this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by cash app as you know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money

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dot casa slash keymaster to check out their multi-sig or email them at membership at team dot casa use that code tftc and get up to 250 off love what they're building love everything that's going on right now in bitcoin love this conversation with will reeds learn about the fold app what they're doing and a little bit about wine country enjoy freaks what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt i gotta take a sip because i just cheers and didn't sip yet ah it's your boy marty ben drinking some delicious mezcal provided by our boy Will Reeves. Will, welcome to the podcast. How's it going, freaks? Marty, good to be here.

Thanks for coming. For you freaks who don't know, Will is the founder of FoldApp, an app that just launched a couple months ago, end of September, correct? Yeah, we've been in beta for a little bit and end of September, but we've been around for a while. Been around for quite a while. Yeah, we've seen the ups and downs of Bitcoin. Yeah. Before we get into the FoldApp, you were just saying you were in asia i was uh let's see spent about a month and a half out in in thailand which was an experience what was that like you know i had to take the the took my dad out for his um 65th birthday flex the remote work possibilities world worldwide bitcoin um and had the time of my life i used to i used to go to asia quite a bit growing up my dad was a um wine salesman out

there and so he would bring me when i was young super blonde and uh just take me to like dinners with the where the red army would be buying wine from them and just i was just completely in awe and had no idea what was going on so it's good to have a return that's pretty badass hey we were uh pre-interview talking here you're from northern california from wine country i am a big fan of wine country and uh you're boys with uh a wine club that we're part of scribe yeah love scribe shout out to scribe um you'll have to come by next time you're out there give me give me a shout i definitely do um when you said you're boys with those guys i was like i'm definitely going to text him the next time i'm out there um but so what was your how did you hop around thailand you stay in

one spot no i think i went just about everywhere you can go i started in bangkok saw that absolutely wild city um the just riding around the tuk-tuks there street food was phenomenal um then up north got to see some island action down south almost crossed paths with dan held when he was out there actually which would which would have been quite a thing quite quite uh it's always great running into bitcoiners and random parts of the world they're everywhere were you were you actively seeking out bitcoiners when you're on your travels no but it's you know of course you're just out there you're you know you're you're you're putting stuff out there and then you know people hit you in the dm saying oh i'm i'm in the town right next uh right next to you let's hang out um i actually

had a crazy i don't even want to blow up this guy's opsec but very large bitcoiner uh very active on twitter i was driving in in chiang mai i look out my window and he's just walking down the street with his family i had no idea he actually lived there um and so uh i couldn't get away from it's hard to get away from us we're a small group but we're everywhere how many people were in chiang mai oh thousands thousands uh what's uh what was your favorite part of thailand uh food uh food was amazing people were incredible my favorite thing i did i i went on his boat and just floated down the mekong river for like three days with this um about a group of 20 people and So you're with the same group.

You had no idea who they were getting on the boat. And then at the end, you're just like playing cards with them, you know, sharing beer laos and just, you know, the stuff that you see out there is just incredible. Yeah. Asia's a frontier I've not explored yet. I think I've got to kind of sack up and get over to Asia. I've heard beautiful things.

I'd love to check out Thailand in particular. it's a good spot i'll give you recommendations i actually got speaking more bitcoiners peter mccormick has an incredible um itinerary that he can give out did you did you follow as much as i could i it checks out what uh what's the is there activities uh bars you know it was more just the spots where to go to make sure that you're hitting it's a big it's a big place yeah so you know it's um so it was just making sure you know you can you can go a lot of places and so just finding out the right spots and you know good itinerary what was it like working while you're over there uh insomniac that's what it makes you become uh the the time change is difficult so you

basically start at around 8 p.m and uh you take the late shift right as everyone's waking up and you're probably you know wake up again at 6 a.m but the good part is that you have the whole day just to mess around explore so that was positive yeah and it's um now it's uh i work for a remote team too and it's interesting uh the coming from an office job to a remote team the uh sort of habits you have to develop and you have to be responsible for yourself oh yeah and and the rest of the team needs to flex as well even to just where everyone else is right and so i think the beauty of like a remote team is is understanding that you know people are going to find themselves in different situations you know life is going to take them different places family work stuff and

you know the team is less about is is as equally flexible and like you know in the work and also in the kind of lifestyle that they let you know everyone else live around them all right so i guess we'll start uh our dive into fold from a unique angle how do you go about picking the people to be on this uh distributed team this is uh this is what this is one of the things where i'm constantly thinking because you know we're you know we're small we're about six people and so each person you add is is is changes could considerably change the entire culture could for better for worse and so far we've been super lucky that it's uh for whatever reason and i'm starting to figure out what the formula is is that we've been we've been choosing we've been

betting on the right people so what we've learned is um you know there's a lot of people who will come within the within kind of the bitcoin or crypto ecosystem that are you know looking for work looking for gigs but um and you you want someone passionate about just what we're doing you know it's not an easy place to work and so you need to believe in something and find your place in it and so that's important but even more that is just being excellent at what you do and outside of that bringing a fresh perspective is is is what i look for but i'd say the key thing for us is that every single person on the team was a direct referral or had worked with someone else on the team so um everybody had uh spent time a year two years already working with you

know one of the other teammates and brought them on it was like vouched for them already had a you know a good way of working with them that has just makes them able to just get on the team hit the ground running and just like mesh with the culture like um after crypto springs we did our first off-site in uh in palm springs we've got the whole team down there and you know it's one thing to to see each other on hangouts or zoom every day and then work there but when you get everyone in the room it's like all right how how are we all gonna act we like each other you know and uh this was one of just the most fun times i've had just hanging out with good people and so when you are also doing good work you know you're doing something right yeah that's i mean common theme

on this podcast is uh pumping the the amount of good people that you meet along the way in this bitcoin journey so what the hell are you guys building fold app uh i've been using it a bit actually to buy amazon vouchers to shop on amazon using bitcoin via the latent network i think i've been buying $50 voucher i think about a hundred no 50 um i bought a $50 about two $50 vouchers via lightning transaction when i did it from my zap wallet and did it pretty seamlessly within the app and just have loaded up my amazon account that's uh been my experience up to this point so what uh what are we building at fold why are you building it how did you get to this point yeah I mean, in short, we're trying to build a Trojan horse for hyper-Bitcoinization.

How do we get Bitcoin to the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time while educating them about what it is? Because ultimately, Fold is trying to bring Bitcoin and make it accessible and rewarding to everybody. And so that means reaching far beyond those that even currently have it. And so, you know, right now, as it stands, Fold allows you to earn Bitcoin while shopping at, you know, the retailers and businesses that you visit every day, whether that's through a credit card or you can even earn even more cash back if you use Lightning and Bitcoin. So the idea is that we make we lower the barrier to entry to to gaining exposure to Bitcoin, make it as simple as possible. but don't stop there the idea is that we're going to continue bringing these these users these these these noobs down the rabbit hole introducing them more and more to what bitcoin the asset can do along the way and so my favorite use case and my favorite user journey is you know the person that

has been curious about bitcoin you know they sync their their credit card or debit card and start to earn it you know they see the number start to go up a little bit and then they look and see okay i understand a little bit what bitcoin is and uh i've been taught about like what a wallet is now i've been introduced what you know to some good wallets um and on fold i can get like you know three four percent more back um if i start spending bitcoin and so what you see people do is start to transfer and this is true of 20 of our users that come in um with credit card and they They transfer over to spending with Lightning in a period of about 30 to 40 days. And so, you know, the idea is that we're educating about Bitcoin as a store of value, as an asset of savings that they can start to accumulate.

But at the end, it's start to show all the various different ways Bitcoin can be used. Why do you think your users are deciding to use Lightning predominantly? Well, partly it's because we only allow them in the app to use Lightning. you know we fold originally was on-chain payments uh into starbucks and you can imagine what that experience is like holding up the line for 10 minutes you may pay a you know a hefty fee for a five dollar cup of coffee you may pay you know a dollar two dollars and it just makes zero sense for any kind of retail payment capacity and so um we knew that lightning was going to be the the only place that would make bitcoin a ability to to make it as a store as a medium of exchange at

all and so we knew that this would be the great experiment was going to be with lightning and so pretty much with this launch of the app is we just cut right to the chase and are allowing users to directly experience layer two as seamlessly and easy as possible so we work directly with a lot the you know great wallets to make sure the onboarding is great um so that users first experience there is as rewarding as they could have expected from their credit card if not even more we can try to incentivize it more by you know by giving pretty much unprecedented cash back rewards to them in bitcoin what's it like uh pitching this to the the merchants on the other side this is uh you know there's the the story of merchant adoption in bitcoin has been long

and fraught and um you know the the original uh you know days of going to merchants and saying you know this is a whole new asset that you need to accept there's all these people that wanting to spend it you know that just never came to fruition that that led to a lot of false starts really and so you had you know i think there was you know expedia i think or priceline and steam all these you know big retailers you know said okay let's check it out and the demand wasn't there and part of the reason is that the experience of spending bitcoin on chain is absolutely terrible there's no incentives at all for anyone to do that and so now when we look at this is that we've changed the conversation it's number one saying to these merchants we know uh that you're

looking for new new customers you know that is a need that you have right now and there are a lot of people out there especially young people you're trying to get their dollars who would rather receive their rewards and loyalty points in bitcoin as opposed to you know your d-based internal loyalty system or your airline miles that constantly get changed and so um you know for for consumers it's it says you know bitcoin's pretty clearly a better reward maybe not money in their eyes yet but it's very very clearly a better reward than anything else on the market and so we can approach these merchants say this is a this is a big opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd and so that's initially where the the conversation starts is

just how do we get more customers to you um but the idea is to uh do the same thing we do to to users is to educate them more and more bring them further and further down the rabbit hole of the other benefits bitcoin can bring and so very quickly the the conversation changes to okay what else what else can this what can add to you to you as a merchant your payment processor and And what they see is that when users spend via Lightning or Bitcoin with us, there are zero chargebacks and there are zero processing fees. And for merchants, that's a multi, multi-billion dollar problem that they face every year. And, you know, on average, their transaction fee is 2 to 5 percent and it's increasing more and more as credit cards are trying to give more and more rewards to lure new users. they're putting that more on the merchants to pay more fees and so it's it's kind of a way that it's

hitting them right at this interesting point where fraud is increasing with with credit and debit cards processing fees are too and so they start to at least think about this it's now we're definitely not in a place right now where they're going to start adopting it at all this is you know for the most part they're still like okay what is bitcoin why are there no chargebacks what does finality and instant settlement mean um and so you know it's we just see it as really a starting point um with rewards that we could just can open up further and further education and yeah it's beautiful and it's i think i completely agree with your uh your thought that lightning is going to enable like more people transacting on bitcoin my set my myself have sent more bitcoin transactions

this year than any other year up to this point. 95% of them have been Lightning transactions, and that's actually something we've noticed on our site, which is actually pretty interesting. I'm interested to see if you're seeing this and fold your users as well. For TFTC, our BTC pay server, something like 86% of all the transactions

that we have received are via the Lightning network, but they only make up like nine percent of the total value we received so yeah and i think that's because of the dime bag and people are just like sending 10 10 cent little things but you know lightning network has been historically you know if you talked about a year ago average payment on lightning network is going to be you know a couple hundred couple thousand sets maximum um and this was kind of the idea you know fold is actually also behind lightning pizza and that was kind of part of the experiment was was all right let's now bring lightning oh you know to the next level in terms of transaction size and to make it something happen in the real world you know

we are we've proven that micro transactions work really well y'all's all of that's you know really exciting stuff now what happens when we start sending you know 25 transactions through lightning and that at the point was was really rare to have happen yeah i believe i bought some dominoes uh you were not you were not alone yeah this was this was i mean just lightning pizza was a success beyond our wildest imagination the full team created it equally as just a project for us to learn about lightning as much as like okay let's let's see if people actually even use lightning for this like it was totally not something that um was guaranteed to happen and so let's dive into a couple things here back to like the charge bags but then on top of that

privacy as well like so you were describing before we hit record record record um how uh one of your biggest headaches right now is credit card fraud and basically the ills of collecting credit card data from other companies that have leaked that data onto the dark web yeah i mean it's anyone who uh accepts you know fiat or credit and debit cards faces this massive problem retailers everybody It's, you know, going through a checkout line at a given retailer is essentially entering a battle zone. Like, you swipe your card, you're giving your data to your bank, you're giving your data to the retailer, you're giving it to the corresponding retailer's bank, you're doing it through anyone who co-branded that credit card, so if it's an Amazon card, you're also giving it to Amazon.

You're giving it to your loyalty or reward point app that you have. You're giving it to any kind of financial planning apps like Mint and not to mention your credit card networks. And all of them have permissions to do almost anything with your data. And now they make it about as hard as possible to not let you know that you actually have some control over this. And you can opt out to a lot of this madness. But for the most part, it's free game every time you swipe your card. It's giving not only your location, but your personal details, your private keys of your credit card, your transaction details, what you're buying, which ultimately just creates multiple honeypots for both attackers and advertisers alike, which creates this idea that now credit card and personal transaction data is rife on the dark web and freely available to, honestly, whoever wants it. So it is a problem for anybody who accepts credit cards.

It's pretty crazy. Yeah, and then we were talking about the Vice documentary that we also mentioned in the episode with Wiz, but it's crazy how accessible it is. And this documentary in particular was in Atlanta, underground gang network basically using Bitcoin to buy this information on the dark web and then creating credit cards

and basically committing credit card fraud and all these merchants got fucked but via chargebacks. Yeah, and this is why, you know, when we talk about, you know, spending Bitcoin, Fold can actually, and we've done this before, so one thing we notice is that because we work with prepaid programs,

that's how Fold works, you know, right? You send us a credit card transaction or a Lightning or Bitcoin transaction, and we convert that into a prepaid equivalent at the merchant. and every year after all of the prepaid conventions that happen or nationally we get inbound from all the retailers saying hey you know let's tell me what you're what you're up to like you know our our friends over at x retailer told us that you know they saw you guys were you're working

with them like can you tell us about it and this is all opportunities for to explain to them some of the benefits that that come with this different type of way of transacting with bitcoin and that number one, that it doesn't have to be a painful onboarding experience for anybody, but the benefits that you could potentially get are pretty crazy. And so for them, they understand the benefit that it's a constant cat and mouse game to stop fraud and to protect your customers. And that is only getting increasingly hard. And when you're a retailer and your game is logistics or making sure this you know the shelves have inventory on them you're not the best at protecting your customers data you know and even so you think maybe you know maybe a big tech company like

google is in fact no google is one of the largest purchasers of this credit card user data at these retailers the only difference is they're buying it instead of hacking it yeah it just came out that they're partnering with city group to basically create google wallets whatever oh yeah I mean, and you can see why they're, they're trying to finally, you know, create the full loop between, you know, online advertising and actually in, in store spend. And that's like, that is a Holy grail for them. And, you know, this is very, very clear way to get to it. What's so bad about it though? We should be getting served ads that, uh, of stuff we probably are likely going to buy.

Is it that bad? It's, it's a good, good, good point. And that's something that we get all the time. Okay. Why, why should I care about privacy? what you know and so at fold the the perspective we take because we get that so much is that we're just going to incentivize you to be more private we're going to give you more cash to stay private but really the reason is is you know you have stories like um there was a a guy i think in dc

he was shopping at a supermarket and there was some kind of spill and he slipped on it fell and like broke his back and he sued the the supermarket and the supermarket goes in into his loyalty points and looks at all of his transactions to find a history of buying alcohol and they use that in the court case against him to say that hey you were probably drunk boss but also terrible it's i mean it's that's some cold-hearted shit there was a a fire a firefighter was accused of arson um because uh he um looking at his credit card details they saw that he bought a fire starter at a hardware store and that was used as evidence that he was an arsonist and all of these people came out to be you know totally you know um exonerated and it wasn't like the guy wasn't

actually an arsonist but it just goes to show that there are ways that data can be used that you just never could expect. And luckily, you know, right now we theoretically live in a place that is the most benign to, you know, lazy data practices and lack of privacy. And we can very quickly see, you know, in other places around the world where this can be weaponized against people very, very quickly. And if the infrastructure is there, it will be used. So it's about creating, you know um uh new infrastructure that protects people and this is why like for us it's important it's not just about bringing like bitcoin little b currency to payments and rewards it's about bringing like bitcoin big b the ethos of bitcoin to a privacy sovereignty

to the products themselves as opposed to just slapping bitcoin on something that's already out there and so how how does fold uh allow a user to transact more privately than they otherwise would if they use bitcoin as opposed to a credit card because i can see you guys sort of being a bridge and you're you're in this form now but over time you're like a pokemon that evolves and shed some some features and slowly transitions to bitcoin only um is that i don't want to assume or ask a leading question but uh is that no i mean that's like we consider where we are as the product itself today is supposed to meet the user at where they are today and they don't even need to know about bitcoin and we're going to create something that that entices them to come in so we have to

start at a really elementary level and the idea is that we take them on this journey as the product evolves uh to become more private to become more conscious about what happens with their data to to avoid the common kind of pitfalls that we currently see and not just by beating it over the head that they need to do it but just incentivizing them and so you know right now you know fold works with prepaid cards and prepaid cards have a long history of being something is used to protect anonymity you know for better or for worse and we just use that in an everyday retail context to give that same privacy to everyday consumers and shoppers and so the idea is that you can go through any of these checkout lines with fold and avoid that entire line of

people putting their hands in your data and they're you know with their own surveillance and it kind of throws a wrench in the whole thing it just doesn't give them access doesn't allow them to connect necessarily an identity with transaction data and so it gives a level of privacy it's not perfect but it's by far leaps and bounds better than what is currently available and so our idea is to constantly evolve the product to continuously you know build this case and build these features for users and so the merchant just to them it looks like they're just interacting with fold to them it looks like there's a just a voucher yeah anonymous credit that's there and settled. And, um, you know, this is, you know, the way that, the way that,

you know, we can talk about this to merchants is, you know, there's the, there's the long game and there's the short game. The short game is merchants are, uh, right now experience a problem with rising processing fees that they cannot change or do anything about. You have Walmart trying to create their own parallel POS systems to try to get around Visa and MasterCard fees. Um, you have American Express just announcing today that they are going around to retailers and paying them a half a million dollars to take American Express, who historically has the highest fees, you know, 4% for a given transaction, just to take it. And the reason is American Express gets that much value back from all the direct transaction data that's going to happen. And so for merchants,

they're looking right now for alternative ways of accepting money from their users. And so you start to see a weird pattern that the number one um uh app in the app store finance app was starbucks and the way the starbucks app works is that you don't sync a credit card to that you load gift cards into it and essentially what they've done is divert a massive amount of their consumer spending away from a credit card and to internal prepaid credit that for them lowers lowers fees lowers chargebacks uber is doing the exact same way and so we see this massive shift and and desire for for them to search for alternatives and so fold is really um um when they when we talk to merchants really presenting that that narrative and that vision

now our long game is is the idea that um merchants shouldn't be holding this data and to begin with and in fact it's more of a liability for them than anything and so um that's not something that we come out and talk about it's not our first you know uh point that's not what happens when i get in the boardroom it's not exactly what i say first but we'll get there in a couple years five ten years that's because that is that's going to be the case this game of cat and mouse will will always be against the the merchants they will be at a disadvantage is there an equal amount of stress these merchants feel uh from having to handle this data as uh the amount of joy they get from profiting off of it or you know it's it's hard because it's one of those cases where

you know if you're a small merchant it's not that big of a deal like right you you you you may have heard a couple customers but it's it's it's and first of all you're not a target like large large retailers target or something like that yeah no no names and so the idea is that in last year 50 percent of retailers were hacked or compromised in some way and that 50 percent uh translates into like hundreds of millions of people getting hacked and their data going out into you know freely available to advertisers attackers whoever and so um uh you know for them the idea is uh they benefit from the tracking, the advertising, uh, abilities that they also get, but they also know that when users, when this PR comes out that, that, you know, 50% of their customers

now have been compromised. It's, it's, it's been proven and studied that those users don't come back for another six months. Like there's some crazy figure that people just decide to change their habits away because they feel it's unsafe now the the unwritten rule is that it's going to happen to the other retailer you're switching your spending to anyway it's a it's a structural problem not a problem with one retailer overall yeah why why do we keep doing it though like was there like i'm trying like is there just like a sunk cost fallacy and in the way all this data select collected excuse me that was created like in the 80s 70s or 80s when this credit card system was being created i i mean what like you you look at right now that you know the whole thing of you

know the data is the new um oil you know this whole the whole the story of the 80s to 90s to now has been the ever expanding mining of data out of customers to then use to market to them more and make them even more customers and it's just been about how pervasive and how deep can they get and they're only getting better and more and more and it's historically been a source of massive value and money that's why we have google which is is so um so powerful because that's what they're entirely based on and so it's a business model that's definitely proven out um but i think it's also been blinded by how fast it's come on and we you know there's some negative externalities to this that aren't being accounted for that i think retailers are starting to understand

yeah like we could be erecting the chinese panopticon social credit system of our future without even realizing it right that's that's the thing it's like it's you know they could just flip a switch and turn it on us yeah and it's it's not it's one of those is like when the infrastructure is there it will be used if it can happen it will happen and so you know politics change larger macro things shift and it's not it's not um you know unbelievable that things will be weaponized that were once maybe good like maybe i was maybe i really did like the fact that i got more targeted ads instead of just these you know remember you know early days of the internet where you just get these like massive banners in your face that weren't

relevant at all yeah one day you're getting served uh links to the merch store for rage against the machine the next year uh you're getting sent to the gulag for having listened to them on spotify exactly be careful freaks be aware it is uh do you think that and that's a big theme around here too is like i think people are just too apathetic i don't i'm worried about my fellow man that that's that's that's one of the things that we like we're one of the biggest challenges that i see that we have people ask how okay you care about privacy you care about you this how do you make people care about that why people don't care people aren't going to pay for that people don't want that and it's like you're you're right generally you're right the pain has

not been felt for whatever reason it is something that everyone says they want but we'll do really very minimal things to actually get it and so our position on this is okay well we know how to make people do things and that's pay them to do it. And so we are taking the, the, um, uh, efficiencies that, you know, technology like Bitcoin can bring to, uh, you know, a retail environment, harvesting that, those savings and giving it right back to users as more cash back more than they could ever expect from a credit card or, you know, anything else. And so, and it just happens to come with all of these other good things and so how do you uh see your users balancing the the hodl versus spend versus spend and replace and sats back uh ecosystem do you see sort of uh unknown

externality and uh user um that's what i'm looking for tendencies that sort of arise when they're like all right i can get sats back but i have to spend bitcoin but i can get around this if i just at the same time like buy a little bit of it on the cash app disclaimer cash app's a sponsor or something like do you see any weird things popping up or people using the app and in ways you did not expect yeah i mean um this has been one of the amazing things to watch like the product itself provides a very in real time the warring narratives that are the seemingly warring narratives oh is it a store of value is a medium exchange because it provides opportunity for both you can sync your credit card spend your fiat and start stacking sats and never never spend them

hodl them very soon you'll be able to withdraw it to your your personal wallet um and it supports that use case it also supports the use case of of spending your bitcoin and it's been really interesting to bring you know historically fold was was about spending was about spending bitcoin So we had hardcore users that were there for that use case. There might have been also, you know, they were also hodlers, but they were there and wanted to spend and felt that there was value in doing that. So we helped them do that. Now, when we released support for fiat, we get a bunch of these maximalists and hardcore

hodlers coming back saying, now I can finally use Fold. Thank you for providing this feature so I can, you know, I don't have to spend my Bitcoin, but I can still support, you know, a Bitcoin company like yourself. I'm like, great. but the awesome thing is that those same uh um users will see them in about two weeks later they're like hey check this out and they're getting using services like um spark swap um or you know few and you know in the future could be you know jack mauler's olympus or escher that are instantaneous usd to lightning invoices and essentially it's an instant purchase of light

of bitcoin and an instant sell so there's no exposure to capital gains in this in this scenario what which you know historically has been a huge friction for users spending bitcoin it's it is a headache to do your taxes at the end of the year now we're working on making that easier a couple partnerships with companies that help you do this accounting but one of the biggest things has been the capital gains exposure that you could have that you know that could totally wipe out the value that you got in spending it and users are now taking advantage of these services sending us videos saying hey check this out i'm spending with usd but i'm stacking sats at the bitcoin level on fold and i'm coming out in total with more bitcoin than i started so they buy via like

a spark swap yeah the spark swap right now has been the the most popular use case and people have been using that the most um which is desktop right now hopefully you know trey let's get that on mobile um but that allows for instantaneous um buy of of bitcoin into a lightning channel spend it directly in the same invoice twofold which so right there instant buys and sell and then you get advantage of the another abstraction of privacy there where your bank only sees that you're using spark swap or something like that exactly and i mean we're going to see these you know we we we use what we can and some of these are daisy chaining things together to obfuscate things and other ways it's just to get more efficiencies and you start to look at this

opportunity it's like you have um a user who is has no idea about bitcoin but under the hood this pos system is converting into bitcoin so that the merchant doesn't take the processing hit and has no exposure to chargeback but the end consumer is none the wiser so you start to see how bitcoin can start to be used in retail context in a mass adoption scenario without them ever knowing it's happening and it's equally incentivized for both parties feels like it's happening feels like it's happening like today did you see that uh that video game drop of uh like oh the first person shooter one yeah yes yes yes i haven't checked that out but i saw it's crazy how how fast this is all happening um i feel it i feel there's like some momentum picking up and it started it started

last year and it's i don't know what it is i don't know i don't know if it's just a bunch of new builders coming in or the technology is mature i don't i have no idea but it is happening time is passing it's inevitable it's inevitable 18 more months so what so what would you say to people who think you're dancing with the devil with all these terrible merchants who have historically uh taken our data mishandled it um and like interacting with that uh that beast and still trying to like maintain the the cypherpunk ethos how do you how do you balance that out it's a good question everyone on the team at fold struggles with this and and considers it a challenge to like bring to the product roadmap to bring to you know when we look at what are we going to build this is

this is the tension that is constantly there you know there are easy ways to do what we're doing that don't have any of these other parts that to fold and it's frankly easier to build those things but this the way that we take it is that we almost use the can't be evil scenario build it in a way that incentivizes both parties to use the product right now in the state that they are now not with a bunch of education but use it right now but from the ground up it's built in a way that there are it is fundamentally changing how payments and rewards happen you know fold is a weird it's a weird thing because it's a payment gateway that whose business model is not based on charging fees and it's a rewards platform that's not based on selling user data which are

fundamentally and historically the business models of both of those of those verticals yeah of those verticals and so the idea is to change it from within without sacrificing the incentives for users and merchants to use it today yeah no because it does make sense in the long run that this data does become a burden on these merchants and chargebacks in particular are really what draws me to the quote-unquote merchant adoption meme right like that should be the number one selling point that i'm like you're not going to get charged back and i think uh if more and more i mean this is this debate's been going on for fucking half a decade now too right it is merchant adoption merchant adoption in circles and you know it's

it's historically you know it's a funny thing because um the merchant adoption question historically as you know was largely seeded to at the you know at the the hard fork and the the block size wars were was largely seeded as like a you know a a b cacher goal and it actually was they they were trying to sacrifice everything good about it to solve this weird adoption issue that they had and sacrifice everything good that had been built for this strange use case yeah and so now with lightning we finally have the ability to be like actually we're going to take that territory back you clearly have not done anything good with it um and the technology is a place where we can completely fulfill all of those goals and so it's i think it's at a point where

it is a positive thing to come and it's a reason why it's coming back into the picture now and this is not just about people accepting you know accepting uh getting into retailers that we know retailers proton mail just came out saying that they're actually hodling all the bitcoin i saw that's so boss you see um uh porn hub getting kicked off of paypal um you saw um in the past things like ease you see you saw the the ce former founder of paypal get axed from bank of america yes in the great irony after that and so you all of these things first they came for the ex-founder of paypal and i said nothing what wait they started there this that needs to be mean this in the house of memes here that that could work um and so yeah we're starting to see all these

different ways that merchants can interact with it whether that's you know hodling it for private using it for privacy means using it for censorship resistant means using it because they feel it's an asset that's going to appreciate it's going to help their bottom line or in our case streamline and make more efficient payments and so it's it's something that i don't think i think you know there's a lot of people who made their career on on saying you know bitcoin is not for payments and i think now that's starting to seem a little anachronistic it's like we actually can do both right now bitcoin is large enough to accomplish that yeah do you ever worry you're too early though is that always this is and this is you know being in this space in general is is you

have to always think that way and so the reason i'm even working on this is you know i think primarily out of the white paper and in the you know after mining the first genesis block the use case of hodling was pretty much supported in an incredible way ascend and receive and hodl and so that technology was almost right out of the gate just great for a use case of store of value and and um the the accumulation uh use case of bitcoin and i think that makes sense the the the idea of it being a medium of exchange the infrastructure for that has never ever been there not even close it's only now that you start to see how it could be there and now we may be early but you if you're not working on it now it will never happen it will always be early i bought a

four dollar ad on a beta video game via lightning from somebody who was on the complete opposite side of the earth this morning yeah and we're seeing we're seeing that you see some of my favorite new things you have so if we just look at you know what i imagine how bitcoin has started to tap into these what i see as these payment reservoirs that happen in in the you know incumbent world you know we are taking on payments and rewards billions of dollars are locked up in in rewards if every if every person who earned rewards in the u.s last year got bitcoin back instead of their you know points or airline miles 16 million bitcoin would have been distributed it's no it's no joke this is like we talk about instant ways to instantly get distributed

everywhere like that's one of them but there are a lot of others there's uh stack work is working on essentially mechanical turk for um using lightning for uh payout in bitcoin excuse me and you think about you know it as a global use case you know it's a couple satoshis 100 satoshis is one thing here but it's it's it's good money in different parts of the world and so So you start to see how its use as a payment rail is both a way to explore a new use case, but it's also about distributing Bitcoin more widely to the rest of the world more efficiently than just locking it up in a kind of speculative use case. And so even if all of these payment use cases end up with people as hodlers at the end of the day,

we're happy with that. That's fine. yeah no i think a good example of uh this is the utxo consolidation we saw over the weekend sergey from bit refill i think pointed out that um that binance they seem to have consolidated the dust dust outputs in their tether wallet so apparently uh tether every time tether is burned or something it creates a bitcoin utxo of 564 sats which is about like four and a half cents right now i checked this morning or whatever the price is four and a half cents according to whatever the price was this morning um when i was thinking like shit man like if that was on chain like one utxo you're never gonna send that so that's what they did they consolidated millions

of them into bigger utxos but i've received less than 500 satoshi payments on the light network many times yeah without a problem it is it has loosened up people's relationship in a certain way you know there's obviously the hoarding element will always be there you know everyone on on the full team is is a hodler like we're not spending down our bitcoin but our but a lot of us are spending our bitcoin are spending bitcoin that we get specifically to to fulfill that that given transaction and so what we've seen is that lightning first with this idea of you know a couple sats sending here here has just loosened people's relationship to bitcoin overall in a way that makes it flow far more freely than it ever has before and that alone changes a lot in in terms

of people's relationship to it yeah now it's crazy running right uh like the merch store it's sort of becoming a way to just via accepting lightning where people are buying merch via lightning but i've come to realize so the way we've hooked it up with our shopify is we've had to do a workaround shout out dj seeds for putting this together uh via btc pay server where um users can buy merch using bitcoin via btc pay server but then i have to manually go mark the the item as paid on the back end on chapify but then it takes that for my business account and like thinking about this a lot of people are buying using lightning but for me as a business owner if i just add bitcoin uh like receiving bitcoin via lightning as a functionality

that's actually a way to get exposure to bitcoin like i'm buying bitcoin at a discount basically because they're buying merch and my business account is just getting charged the raw cost for that and I'm getting the profit on top of that bought in Bitcoin right away and sent right to my custody. I mean, this is what, you know,

so one of the issues that we always had and always a legitimate criticism about Fold in the past is that we were essentially an off-ramp, right? Selling Bitcoin to get prepaid access. And so one of the great things of introducing rewards to this is that now we are almost hodling 100% of what we bring in as Bitcoin payments

because we're paying those out as rewards to users using fiat and their Bitcoin. And so we're creating this closed loop system now where it's not being offloaded and sold in the way that we had to in the past just to keep the lights on. We're keeping it internal and rerouting it as rewards, which also creates a whole new relationship for at least us as a business

and keeps that buy pressure right. So how do you go about building this app while Lightning itself is being built out, like building on top of something that's not finished yet? It's a great question. You know, a lot of times we get people asking, oh, so, you know, BTC pay servers underneath it. Right. And it's not. Fold has built out 100 percent everything under the hood. And it's not because we don't want to use BTC pay server. We love BTC pay server. We think it's one of the most exciting projects in the space. it's because we need to be on the ground looking at how lightning is developing as a technology and we need to see that forward we're basing a lot of our business on the growth of lightning happening and if we don't have that on the ground look at how it's progressing the

challenges that it's being that are facing it the limitations the you know some key benefits that can be you know uh um uh got from it like we lose out on a huge opportunity and puts us at a disadvantage and so we build out everything we're managing our own nodes we're you know doing things right then we're doing things wrong then we learn how to fix it and constantly the greatest part about the lightning community right now is that it is so um geared towards um improving this and sharing information that, you know, people that would, you know, consider we'd be competitors to, we're freely sharing information about, you know, how to improve our stack, how to improve our Lightning. Like 10% of every Fold's employees' time is to contributing open source to Lightning,

whether that is, you know, tooling to manage your node better, educational materials, you know, things like this that is all in spirit of, you know, we're doing this as a community. and so it is definitely not without its challenges and we we see those firsthand and that's kind of the point of why we build out everything so how is uh the network changed as you've been building on it has it gotten better worse things that uh you want things that you need things that you wish weren't there so i would say when we first there was a huge controversy that happened when we launched uh lightning pizza because there's a stat that we said saying like you know you know 50% of transactions didn't go through or something like that.

And there were certain other communities who loved that stat and jumped on it as a reason why Lightning could never work. And actually, it was kind of our fault because we didn't actually position that stat right. It was also the fact of onboarding into Lightning wallets was also the issue. And so for us, we have seen huge leaps of improvement in user experience of wallets themselves.

so onboarding is getting better and better you're starting to see you know at that at that time the only viable wallet to get someone casually onto lightning to try lightning pizza was blue wallet at the time that was something you could spin up really quickly get it done it's custodial you know there's all you know all these other criticisms of it but it was definitely the easiest way to get started it works it works i'm not gonna lie i've used blue wallet this morning we we had so many people we were doing uh we were you know we'd have people come out saying oh you know people who've been in bitcoin for a long time you know always non-custodial they would say okay like actually how should i how do i get how do i get lightning pizza we're like okay well

here are your options and wallets and they'd always come back and say you know what i use blue wallet i really liked it and they wouldn't admit that in public and there's you know there's a reason because you know i did a demo matt yelled at me because i did a demo on my phone just to show how the uh the dime bag worked um because i was pushing lightning network microtransactions i use blue wallet i got some shit from people i was like fuck it it works i only have ten dollars on there get off my back yeah we're i mean i i think there's a uh custodial solutions provided let me be clear i use other non-custodial wallets as well and many many wallets i jumped from wall to wall i just happened to hit the blue wall at that time that that's a good caveat marty

save your dms um you know there's a immediate uh uh bringing a custodial wallet to market is much easier to do in a user-friendly way much faster to do non-custodial has a longer time horizon and it's catching up already and we're already seeing it there and so you know if you ask like what do we need from the lightning network what do we want and one of them was just wallets to to improve their ux and i would say right now i'm kind of changing from improving the ux because i think there's a lot of really good solutions that need six months a year and then they'll be really good but the thing that we're seeing now is uh channel management and liquidity is the big problem we frequently have users from many different of the wallets

that we all know saying i can't route a payment to folds because we've exhausted all of the payments to our to our side of the channel that people from those wallets have just spent it all our way because we're one way right now and the wallets are still learning on how to spin up new channels with more capacity with more um for the ability to route higher payments like 25 through fold on nearly 100 of the time 200 400 payments through phone takes you know sometimes we can run into issues there but that has you know that's coming from a time where we were excited about a $25 payment in February with lightning pizza. Now we're regularly transacting 200, $250 every day. That's eight X improvement there. Oh yeah, of course. And it's, you know, and part of that

is that there's a ceiling, like the develop, like lightning developers are purposely keeping that limit low for good reason right now. Um, we don't need to be too reckless. So, uh, I, I think most of the things and most of the criticisms that i see are it's it's one of those things that it's just like yes i see it you're right but just wait a little bit and it will be there yeah i mean like bitcoin and lightning both of them more bitcoin i mean bitcoin in the eyes of the mainstream and lightning network in the eyes of uh the people closer uh in bitcoin and in the space this shit is not going to happen like out of the box overnight like nothing rome wasn't built in the day that's like hilarious to people like oh this thing sucks it's like it's fucking yeah i

mean and almost two years old and i think like i'm i'm one of those people who believe that the majority of onboarding is going to be layer two and it's going to be rare for people to hit layer one yeah why do you believe this um there is a level of an expectation of what um uh products can do there's no there's no doubt that you know when we release things our product is not judged in the realm of the world of Bitcoin it's judged in the world of as it is with everything else and every other available option with all of their trade-offs and all of our trade-offs it's judged in that greater sphere and lightning is the only chance that we can have a user experience that even comes

close to what can be offered with cheaper options that sacrifice a lot more but in the moment may make it seem like a good trade-off even though you're sacrificing more than you know lightning is the only way it's going to get to a user experience um that that is going to be expected by a bunch of people now we'll see if the use case you know if bitcoin just becomes a safe haven for you know rogue states then maybe we don't need to care about lightning too much i don't think that's gonna i mean rogue states will definitely use bitcoin but i think others will too i i think i know i certainly want to use it i we we know for of fact people want to use it the just adding uh fiat alone has grown our lightning transactions

from people moving to there to lightning to just raising the awareness people are saying oh what is the very fact that we are offering in our app a way for you to use it and just having it's it's like the cash app um effect millions of people are using cash app and there's just this bitcoin symbol ever present in front of you boss you it's it's it's it's one it's not only that in their metadata it talks about bitcoin on the app store and it's one of those things that is just right it's like it's the next level bitcoin sign guy it's it's shout out psg shout out bsg just had a great couple days with him out in berlin at the lightning conference um and it's it's one of those things that is is um starts to raise awareness and starts to even put it as a potential option

in front of people that would have never thought about it or or even looked at it before and so that's kind of what fold is trying to do we see ourselves we want to see ourselves as not just a bitcoin company but just a straight up consumer retail spending option that is going to just pump bitcoin into your life in ways that are unexpected yeah and with lightning in particular i've been i don't want to say apprehensive but more skeptical i've been okay i've been a little apprehensive and a little skeptical or i was at least um just because it's like all right this is brand new it's like a huge endeavor and you don't know you're literally holding your breath until you see people adopting it and using it i think uh i'm becoming less and less apprehensive

and skeptical particularly more recently because you see uh deb tooling come out so you saw like Jamal James, who did the Lightning residency at Chaincode over the summer, Create Polar, which is a tool that devs can use to create reg test Lightning setups. So it seems from an outsider's perspective, outsider to the developer community's perspective, looking in, it seems that developers in particular are interested in using this to build and are actually building tools to make it easier to build on, which is a good sign. And it's what you want to see. Yeah, that's so important.

and you know what to be honest like it's going to be layer two our bet is lightning and lightning is what we have now and it's working and progressing the exact beyond our expectations but it may be something else in the future it very well could be and we're here to to follow that trail wherever it goes in service of building upon the base protocol and increasing adoption Like, we're there on that path, but, you know, with Lightning, it's funny to see right now people are even saying, okay, you have a bunch of devs on the, you know, on the payments use case of Lightning. I want to make a Lightning messaging app, and you start to see this. It's like that's also a good sign when it starts to diversify on top of the protocol the various different uses, And it's people are finding opportunity beyond what it's maybe core use was promoted as

and starting to see all these varied different things that it could also be. Yeah. No, WhatsApp. Shout out WhatsApp. Like, it would be crazy if you could build, like, an Alipay or WeChat that's completely distributed and you own your own data and you have a quasi-passport and your lightning node. It's the dream. And I don't think it's that far off.

I mean, it's, it is, what do you think it's imperative? I think, I think it's imperative. I think if you're in this space and you are not building for those use cases, I think you're missing the point of what we're here for. I think this is an interesting segue into how you got into this and your story, um, about hearing Bitcoin at a, uh, a town hall meeting or, uh, yeah, this is, um, uh, so I, I look back and I had basically like three seminal moments with Bitcoin before I ever even really dove down the rabbit hole. And one of those, as I'm already mentioned, I grew up in Northern California, wine country.

And one of the things I was working on was services for migrant workers coming through. It's kind of a shadow population that comes through, several thousand each year, they come and go. And so really, there's no infrastructure built. And so the idea was, OK, how do we support this population that essentially supports the prosperity of this town year long? And they're only here for a couple of weeks. And so we talked about we got brought housing, legal representation, medical. And one guy was coming out there and saying, giving workshops on alternatives for remittances to send money back home.

And the reason why is because a lot of these guys would either take a 15% to 20% hit sending remittances back home on a Western Union or whatever, but also some of them would bring it with them, which would cause personal danger and harm with them as they follow the harvest going up the Western seaboard. And so this was brought very early on. I can't even remember the exact wallet that he was even promoting at the time because it was so primitive.

Who was promoting it? It was a guy from UC Berkeley, I believe, and he just came out there. the whole thing was that this was citizens coming together to provide services and connect them. So it was like, are you a lawyer? Okay, great. Come help out. Are you a, you know, you're a doctor. Okay. You can give a, you know, on the spot clinic, you know, you have land. Okay. We can, we can put some temporary housing on there for every year. And, uh, that was kind of just one, you know, it was something that passed my mind. There was a lot of problems. And so this was like one really interesting one that, you know, didn't, didn't strike me at the moment that I would be,

you know, lead me to here in this day, but, um, it was an early one, you know, but I think, you know, two others, I had one, I was living in Argentina, uh, and, um, the house I was in a, was they had a big family party and one of the cousins was there and he was a big security researcher, dev developer down there. And he was telling me all about this thing called Bitcoin. And, um, he was saying how he was, you know, it's the future, it's money. And his family was laughing them off and everything and argentina went through a couple defaults since then the guy used it legitimately as a safe haze and asset and came out on not only on top but very stronger but like citadel in argentina boss and was able to completely demonstrate the narrative an incredible

use case of of what it could be of exiting an economy in turmoil at a time told you fuckers as soon as they printed those 100-year bonds, I was out of here. So it's like these use cases are just hitting me, these very pure demonstrations of what it could be are just hitting me directly in the face. A later one was Occupy Wall Street. I was involved in that in Oakland for a little bit,

and we were taking donations and paying out vendors with Bitcoin. And it wasn't a lot of Bitcoin coming through, but this was one of the first times that anyone saw you know bitcoin signs and qr codes and like onboarding people who had no idea what it was to just you know custody it and how would that work with a bunch of people who needed access to it to pay out different people and again censorship resistant payments like these like beautiful kernels of what this technology could be and that would ultimately go through all these all these different narrative changes but it was just

one of those things that was just so very clear um and uh provided like a in in aggregate like oh damn this is this this is something i need to pay attention to and how do you end up like all right fold is the way that i'm gonna pay attention to it like what uh good question like My background is, you know, I'm an entrepreneur building companies primarily in payments, consumer, and retail. And in one of those gigs, I was working alongside on a project for Google with Matt Luongo, who is founder of Fold and now works as a lead of Thesis, founder of Thesis, doing a lot of crazy work over there, too. and we were just working together, and we were sharing ideas, and it just was a fit. It was one of those times when on-chain Bitcoin just wasn't seeming like it was going to actually happen, and we knew Layer 2 was coming, and once we saw the inklings of that, we're like,

let's get this thing going. Now is the time to start this thing again. This use case, again, is here, and we have a good shot at it, so we partnered up and got to work. was this like were you at a point in your life where like all right i need to give up what i'm working on now and i want to focus on this was the most exciting important thing i could think of working on you know i before that you know working on you know what other people consider is super exciting things like you know you know autonomous and like all of like in hindsight this is this is by far the most important thing that i could consider myself working on right now where this experiment goes who who knows but um i would absolutely not trade it for any other

life path that that had presented itself to me no i feel very strongly the same way but interestingly you said that you guys saw that layer two was coming and that you decided to hop on that opportunity because i was having a conversation last night uh at a bar here in brooklyn uh with a fellow freak and i've been thinking about this for a while like do you think there's like an order of operations through which these networks can become successful yes is there like a pemdos for a successful distributed peer-to-peer uh trans or peer-to-peer digital cash system i honestly have never heard the pemdos analogy and it's perfect right it's perfect i've been thinking about this for a bit like i like i'm thinking about writing something long form

about it like is there a pemdos for this i i i think we have been experiencing the pemdos in in real time and excruciatingly painful we were going like pa de mas for a while and then we we we you know restructured some people went on the fork of pot of moss and they're doing their thing now i'm not sure what what's happening with them but like it is a hundred percent by trial and error figuring out how to build a system from the ground up again and it and it seems that there is an order of operations that you can only unlock you can see the next level like it's not like everyone couldn't see oh instant payments would be incredible censorship resistant payments around the world everyone could see that that was great some people leapfrogged just to go right to that

tried to go right to that we know how we know what happened we know what's happening with all of that and so you know it's it's not about being able to see it but you you literally have to live through it and build it it's it's it's like how blocks are formed the sediment just needs to build at a certain point where the next layer can be viable at a certain point even if you can articulate it in the in the present yeah it's like an expanding universe revealing itself yeah no but i do i do want to expand on that pemda like i think that's where i think a lot of the confusion in the all coin world is is they don't understand the order of operations that may exist um for these systems to be sufficiently and uh distributed right i think um i think

bitcoin community needs this i think perhaps the rest of the crypto world needs that even more that perspective because i think that's a fundamental i've never heard that way of putting it um i think it's awesome i would love to see a paper on that all right i only get to work all right maybe there'll be a bent tomorrow i'll write about it um no let's let's brainstorm on that um because not is i think uh for um creating mental models of this stuff i think i don't know it just it just seems natural again like zaba talks about the progression from collectible to store value exchange unit of account you can extrapolate that to uh you can only have a defy enabled future if the base layer is sufficiently distributed to

such a point where your average joe can download a full node and verify his transactions yeah i mean we like you just you look at the you look at the you know history of currency that you know he laid out and others have in the past it's about creating the it's you can't skip the steps right you have to go through the steps it had to be at the beginning that bitcoin was this weird ass collectible trading card being traded on a you know um uh you know a mount gox style thing that's used to be trading trading cards and things like that like it had to go through a collectible phase and evolve and now right now and go back to the utxo consolidation like that's what i wrote about today like we're 11 years in and the quote-unquote people with asymmetric information

as opposed to people outside the bitcoin and cryptocurrency bubble still don't have their shit together they don't know how to consolidate utxos and uh interact economically with the blockchain like they're still figuring it out i mean and it's weird that we it's like all that we're building essentially is a technology to facilitate that narrative transition and it will change as it goes like the only thing that was needed at the beginning was essentially what came out and it was a general widely available at the genesis block and in order for then as the narrative changed the technology had to change with it but you you couldn't jump start the narrative the the narrative of it and just bring that technology into the present like it has to

go through these periods yeah it does have growing pains you can't have it all like it's not going to be a completely saturated fully liquid but in stable currency here's where we might you know the silicon valley mindset of just oh we can build that right now oh we got it we got it and it will happen tomorrow and we'll raise a bunch of money and it'll be real and then we realize like we work like you know 10 years later like oh wasn't real whoops having worked at a we work here in new york city it was obvious like we work itself as a vc funded unicorn that was probably bloated and then at the time i was working for a software company that was great company but not not going to be like unicorn status or anything but looking around the other companies on our floor it was

like, ah, they were like Groupon knockoffs and Groupon was already a VC funded asshole company. And the, the WeWork saga, uh, was personified in, in the, uh, the companies that, that roamed its floors, at least in the office that, that, that I was in. Maybe I got a bad, a bad, a bad crop of companies that the, uh, fit that WeWork here in New city but i i you know it's i think the history is going to be defined by there actually was only a couple good ones and we you know free money everywhere easy money allowed a lot of ideas that maybe shouldn't have existed to flourish for a while and you know we're gonna i think history is going to be pretty brutal on a lot of this stuff yeah so you haven't what's made you

this way you've been you were traveling with your dad in asia selling wine growing up uh you were at these these meetings trying to figure out how to help migrant workers what what drives your your passion for this this technology in particular like uh from your past like it seems like you're a good dude who just wants to get back to his community i think that's what i like uh you know we we've known each other for a little bit more this has been a long time in the making but i i buy into your reading right there i think a lot of it is that bitcoin provides a a level of brings a level of truth to interactions and life that is obfuscated and just about every other um you know what we consider technology or where the future is and

things it's it's a lot of that is just like smoke and mirrors and you can feel it and especially working in silicon valley you see it you don't just feel it you see it and so when a technology comes along that just cuts right to the core of it and presents this extremely transparent way of going about life and relating to people that can be audited by anybody and freely engaged with anybody else like the smoke and mirrors like in fact there is no smoke like it's with such a such an incredible incredible counterpoint to crypto overall is like there is a very clear smoke and mirrors and then this kernel of brutal honesty in the center which i consider that's the bitcoin world yeah so what what did you see uh in silicon valley what was your experience like

did you see the monotonous rot of feeding the machine or i mean again not to ask a question you just i would say you it becomes abundantly clear if you spend a couple years living in san francisco and a city that i grew up absolutely in awe of of its beauty its history um you know i started i was before this stuff i was a rhetoric history major studying like how societies transform themselves by like moving to new frontiers and things like that and san francisco is a pretty crazy use case of that and you get there and you start to see it and there's definitely a sense that um things have gone awry or there's a there's some specter that is that is that is fueling this and in just these odd ways and you you start to see that very quickly you start to

see that affect the people there the discourse the conversations the friends and it you know for someone you know I grew up in the Bay Area I got to see it for a long time I grew up in a you know small town up there that you know just barely has a you know a stoplight really and then getting to you know come into the you know the Bay Area and see that and know the history it becomes something that reveals itself like you can feel it in the place and like there's something like about a new york what i love so much is nothing can it's very hard to change this spot it has changed a lot but it is seems endless like someone a force is like that happened in san francisco can take it over in a matter of years because it's small is it is essentially a small village

and so you know like forces like a gold rush or a tech boom or can just absolutely change it without you know in in a matter of a decade it takes things longer here and things change so i admire this about this even though how many people i come here say how much has changed like there's a certain immovability that you feel when you're here um that uh just doesn't happen you know necessarily in you know back home where i'm where i'm from or what i've seen happen so i don't i don't know how that has affected me or how it came to inform it but um it's it's certainly the reality that i've i've witnessed out there yeah no it's it's crazy as an outsider looking in uh san francisco these days in particular gets a lot of shit and it's like there's a weird

sense that when you fly into san francisco and you look down you feel like i can change that place like i can like it is like i can i can see it all out of my the window of my you know airplane and i like it's small it's you know it's it's beautiful it's there i can live a good life i feel i can change that way you look at new york out there i was just walking down out of you know and i had a shot somewhere in williamsburg and looked out to the the skyline of manhattan out there and you just feel completely it's the concrete jungle you feel inundated for you like i'm not you know i'm just going to be living my life here it's going to affect me i'm going to have a good life and try to do it you know and you know i know there's a bunch of there are

certainly forces here that are are not for the positive but they don't seem um as pervasive as what can happen and kind of monoculturally can happen in a place like san francisco yeah i want to bring back the uh the san francisco from film noir oh yeah my favorite that's uh very nice that i took like american literature classes in college for a few of my electives dove into a lot of film noir especially in the film classes obviously that's a wonderful period of san francisco there's so many good ones i mean right part yeah part of what i what i studied there was the growth of san francisco how that changed how it changed from this essentially little village on the edge of the pacific that was inhabited by at one point 10 nations all

saying they laid claim to it to what it is today i never knew that yeah and part of it was a tech very very powerful technology called the goddamn railroad that allowed that was essentially used to to change the narrative of who owned that who controlled culture and at the end of that railroad they created universities to to indoctrinate that idea of who's you know that They would say that this railroad is an unbroken line between here and ancient Greece directly to San Francisco that will take that thread of history. When most people there were from Russia, China, indigenous populations, Mexico. But no, nothing to care about this unbroken line from Greece. We're all nation building and world building in their own way.

but this technology gave them an unprecedented power to to to lay claim to that that was that was able to be extremely successful yeah that's why it's like such a shame to see the state today like the state of san francisco today because it's got such a rich history this it'll come back we will great melting pot but like i saw a woman tweet somebody tweeted out a picture of their tesla being broken into and like the tweet was hey this is the fourth time this has happened in a month let's figure this out san francisco and somebody quote tweeted it was like maybe you shouldn't be flaunting your richness in front of everybody it was like what the fuck like you can't expect common decency of your fellow man not to break into your car like that's

that's what that is a that is called a you know a san francisco you know welcome right that's how we that's how we welcome you oh it's happened to me before yeah my first trip when my first trip to sonoma to hillsburg uh like five or six years ago yeah we're actually on our way back as martin luther king uh weekend and it was martin luther king junior day and we were in golden gate park it was again a holiday there were thousands of people we had our car parked in golden gate alongside like hundreds of other cars were dumb philadelphians had no idea of what was going on we go walk into the uh the japanese garden walk walk through that beautiful spot yeah beautiful spot it's the uh background of my phone still oh yeah um yeah we got our shit ganged yeah

window broke took all of our bags made we were dumb get all of our bags in there but it happened that was you know i i lived in the tenderloin of san francisco which i don't know if you know that's like yeah i've been there before yeah um so some people come to visit i i was living there for a while um and that was and the funny thing about san francisco what if anything if the tourism board of san francisco could change one thing it was it would be to not make all of the hotels essentially in the tenderloin so that you're basically having all these visitors come through and that's what they see that's well this year when we went to sonoma before bitcoin 2019 we stayed in the tenderloin and my wife's first visit to san francisco and she was not happy we

got out of our cabin there's literally some dude masturbating right outside the hotel that's you I had neighbors and outside neighbors. That would be common, but let's vote for a couple more hotels more equally distributed throughout the city to give a... Why don't they want the build more? That's the problem, right? So here, that's a good question. It's a weird thing, right?

A lot of people liken, not liken, but there are some similarities between building real estate and realist block size right and there are arguments like okay why would i want to increase my uh why would i want to allow someone else to increase the utility of my area around me if that's if i live in such a scarce asset why would i want to allow that if that's going to depress any kind of uh you know price and chance of my home going up i can if i more the more scarce my my land is the more it's going to go number is going to go up and so the you know the idea the scarcity thing is bitches don't understand marginal utility there you go let's go a hundred

percent a hundred percent so we need to bring that these these things that we have learned into the space into san francisco politics but it may be too far gone anyway for that but um yeah they just elected some zealot right uh who for da uh oh so this was um the guy who came from the weather under his parents were weather underground murdered some yeah i think they were behind one of the bombings yes i don't know unfortunately because i actually lived in san francisco for a couple years i find my home and i call uh where i live in the bay is oakland which has a whole different world congrats good good for you yes so i you know i was i was a trans transitory figure in san francisco but um yes i think that did just happen i don't know

politics too much but um i've definitely heard some things yeah yeah this guy's apparently been groomed by some left-wing extremists yeah and it's not my city that's not my city not yours you know not my city either except they won't stop calling me to vote on these ballots so maybe i should answer these and say okay give me a ballot i'll vote well that was another thing apparently like the voter turnout was pretty abysmal for the shit too yeah and you know the way you know it's it's stack rank and things like that so that just the we talk about governance and how governance is supposed to work and like the technology of governance produces the governing body you know like how how people vote and the rules around who is elected

produce the certain people who get into these offices and create the incentive systems through which people try to exploit exactly and so we're seeing these in real time and experiment there in a place that historically has had you know pretty much no no no um balance of another there's no other party in san francisco right there's just there's just you know uh you know left leaning and like left extreme and so we get to see what that what happens there really yeah as a lifelong californian do you think california breaks up secedes it was interesting when draper draper submitted that proposal for it he says to this day that it would have passed for sure um but you know i i know like up closer to where i live there's the whole jefferson state movement

and that's like what's that it's a it's a movement to break up california basically everywhere um sacramento and north essentially um and southern oregon and a little of idaho i believe or something like that uh would break off into its own state because the interests are so misaligned um with the rest of california and the power bases just basically mean they're unrepresented up there yeah they're beholden to la and san francisco yeah so you see this you know you'll get up on you'll be driving up the 101 you pass um uh you know sonoma county and then basically after that is when you start to get into you have entered jefferson state state of jefferson um you'll see the propaganda everywhere you know it's it's one of those things that goes

in and out of being you know a serious movement to just the relics of the propaganda are there but then it will it constantly is coming in and out and being a thing and so i think i think in general the if it's not going to happen then california will have had to have found a way to govern more locally um which is hard to hard to imagine that outcome happening at the moment um it seems like you were trying to get involved with that well that's that's yeah there's plenty there's plenty of people doing that well it's it's also crazy most people especially us dumb americans don't realize that california is bigger than like canada yeah a bunch of other countries like people don't realize how fucking big california is exactly and you you definitely feel

that like that's what i'm kind of talking about like you know you can feel like you can change you feel like you could change San Francisco but coming to New York you feel like you're gonna be the ones who's gonna be more changed you know you look at California as a whole and you're like oh my god how you know that that almost seems out of reach as well and so I do think there will there has to be a shake-up there has to be something because interests are increasingly being misaligned focus is being paid to a smaller smaller aggregate of people and like you just see it in all different style that's why like the water situation in california is so terrible like and all of these pieces of california politics are are show this what

happens when it becomes misaligned with the general electorate well is california just a little microcosm of what's going on in the world right now we got hong kong chile bolivia uh venezuela lebanon iran iraq there's people are pissed off right now people are people are a little hot-tempered and and showing i i agree i but i would say so people are saying like oh right now is different but i would like it has been like this for a good decade and countries have been changing their then i mean the whole syria debacle yeah there's like it's not this is not a new thing as in the last year or two this is a a musical chairs of rebellion but do you agree that the music's coming to a bit of a crescendo right now well it's i think it's

coming to a crescendo because hitting centers of power that have historically not been hit like the hong kong uh china thing is is um absolutely a moment where okay the world's watching the world's watching and not only that is that this it is that an unprecedented power who's already demonstrated that they don't necessarily deal with problems in the way that other countries they do not give a fuck yeah and so i think we'll we'll see how that ends up i wish um uh health and safety to those doing good work out there uh but i i i agree it's only ramping up yeah no i wish health and safety to those as well but i am very worried for your health and safety yeah yeah i don't mean to even do the thoughts and prayers kind of thing no so

that's why you know you start to see you know taking this back to bitcoin like people setting up i think it was matt starting to like send out uh sats over to you know creating campaigns to and sats back to the hong kong protesters and like let's there are certain moments where this like this can be demonstrated the hong kong protesters hsbc was canceling bank accounts for them yep and so i love their mexican drug lords but if you're trying to protest the uh yeah the communist party of china you're uh you're fucked and we see you know finance like i was uh driving back to my trip in thailand i was going down the mekong delta mekong river and they were pointing out you know hey look at this look at this amazing bridge that's being

built it's got a railway directly from beijing to bangkok and they're like the chinese are are building it and they're like oh okay but you know connecting the the region okay cool um and they say well actually not not not cool um they they come in and they bribe officials to essentially approve plans for incredibly large infrastructure projects and they have terms where if you don't pay this back in a certain amount of time this is effectively our sovereign zone oh china's doing this yes so they're doing this in africa as well and they just see and they're not they didn't seized but this is what's it real time happening in kenya at the largest port in kenya i believe yeah alex gladstone's all over this yes and so this is this is like a four trillion dollar

initiative or something like that so this is directly out of the playbook and it is honestly genius playbook it's like if you uh if you've ever read a life of an economic hitman that's what you know you make them dependent there you go yeah yeah and so i think if there's any time for a counterbalance of this idea of massive credit and massive expenditures of money that can dwarf any logical agreements or can easily take over the basically bribe of your governing bodies that are so overwhelming

in the terms of how much money is on the table that there's a counterbalance in power that is almost on is unbelievable and that has almost an inevitable outcome and so you start to see how a a counterbalance of a different type of of money to sovereign money for this to happen is is more important than ever now will that be bitcoin i don't know i hope it will but like there needs to be like at a at a base layer of the currency needs to be something to fight against this because at the end of the day the money creation is happening at only a few locusts around the world and that gives incredible leverage against everybody that gives the most amount of leverage that anybody can have against anybody else right

because that is the most important tool is money it is there to communicate uh value transfer between disparate goods and now it is why i'm up why i'm very optimistic because it does feel like we are it can't get that much worse like it's literally it's literally you have to be optimistic because it's we just literally end up in 1984 full-on right chinese surveillance state exported to the rest of the world and that just doesn't seem tenable like uh it doesn't seem good doesn't seem tenable but then you have like 1.5 billion people in china living under this regime yeah but in a lot you know even it's it's not like two billion how many people they're also living under this too and it's like it's not that that this is being

exported by the people of no but it's the corporations it's the corporations and these are technologies that are allowing this to happen this is this is ideas of of how money works and how money can be deployed and taking advantage of economic climates and other countries that provide on the surface great benefits but come with incredible drawbacks that just can't be known in the moment yeah and that's what's actually interesting to see on the uh the world world stage right now uh is the battle for 5g and that's the battle for 5g the battle for cooperating on 5g or going our separate routes right and i think i saw something today where it looks like china and the u.s are dead set on just going their separate ways in this 5g world

and so you could have a bifurcation of the digital world happening here if i mean you look at if 5g He's not turning us all into drones or whatever, giving us all cancer. But if it is... If we survive the cancer, then yes. We get over that, and there's technology worth pursuing. It seems that we might bifurcate into two worlds here. It seems like it. I mean, the Silk Road Initiative, I believe that's what it's called that they have.

Yeah, the Silk Road Initiative they have, I think that's already been presented. There's two world operating systems right now that are being offered. and they're definitely not both wholesome and great for the rest of the world like absolutely and that's not what i'm saying but this is almost a a a point where you know interoperability was fine while we're all figuring it out you know we're stealing each other's technologies you know figuring it out but now we figured out how to create these walled gardens that that are extremely extremely powerful and can operate at the state level and be exported exponentially.

The U.S. has been doing it for a long time, and China has just developed its own special blend of what that is that seems particularly powerful, and in contrast to what we've seen. Yeah, yeah. And it seems like just recently, in the last six months in particular, you have people starting to question, like, why do we have UI here giving us our surveillance technology?

I think that was an article in the New York Times about the subway system here in New York. They're considering experimenting with HUI's facial recognition technology. But it's cheaper, Marty. It's cheaper? So fuck, though. We're all face fucked. We're face fucked. We are.

And that's weird. It's unfortunate. And again, it's like there's nothing we can do there. we are erecting these systems that again can just flip a switch one day and it can be oh we're catching we're catching uh people that are jumping the fair and then the next day it's like oh this dude said something on twitter 30 minutes ago we saw that he was at the monroe stop so we're gonna pick him up at 14th street and union square because we don't like what he said yeah like that is that will be possible i think that's why you're like when you look at a world

where things seem so abstracted away from you but you see the consequences you see where it's going and you seem almost like looking at new york you seem powerless for stopping where it's going that's why like you know you ask why you know how do you find yourself working on the stuff you do that's a hundred percent part of it is looking okay i'm gonna contribute time and energy and and mental focus to a technology that could potentially change the balance in some way and again this is all an experiment and so if there's an imagine this world that you see today and this experiment wasn't being run which which experiment the surveillance state or bitcoin bitcoin yeah imagine if this if things if this movement was not it i know i can't imagine it

it would just be scary i've been thinking about this too long i can't imagine please don't take bitcoin from me please but with that being said like uh do you see people yeah we were talking earlier about apathy and stuff like that but like is it is it too far gone like i i don't think it's ever too far gone or else if if once that once you like if you're building stuff and you're like putting effort once you believe that it like it's like why wake up and do it and so that's actually not the question what they ask okay good you're saying it's an experiment when is it not an experiment oh when is it not an experiment is like some people when

does the experiment become the reality yes that and some people would argue bitcoin's not an experiment it's working as is it is today i i completely agree but i i think it is i i still think that to not view it as an experiment and something that needs to continue being worked on is is is the wrong way to go and that's why i think it's naive definitely this idea of ossification and all this stuff is a little naive right now i think i wouldn't ask i don't want ossification right now i just want ossification in people's minds to be like hey this should be our goal that we should get to and so here here this brings me to okay i'm going to talk about fold right now a part of the like trojan horse aspect of fold is to again i said earlier is to

distribute as much Bitcoin to as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. The idea of that is both to get people to get exposure to asset and start to learn about it, but it's also about building an electorate of people that have its ideals and vote for its ideals or exert political power in favor of that. And without things that teach people that, people don't know necessarily how to act and so i think giving someone something and teaching them and them learning to value it over time will be something that people defend and i think that's when you change apathy from away from just like i don't know how to fix it to like okay here's one small thing i can do yeah and it's like hey i've learned so much about this and know how it's

impacted my life that it is imperative that we all learn yeah and again like what we just said okay imagine your life right now with everything that's going on the world in this experiment that you and i have been working on for a while doesn't exist like satoshi never happened genesis block never happened but the world is still working the way it is we'd be focused on like sofa rates and stuff like that like not even like that's the type of innovation we'd be thinking about not even and so it's it's it's imperative for us when we build things to not just slap it on it but just cultivate this idea the ideals that are brought from it both the stuff given to us from the cypherpunks early on but also now as a global technology that offers an alternative to

what we have and if you're not doing that and you're also working in the space then you know i think you could be more effective how can we best uh work to not come off as a cult that's a good question does it need to be a cult yeah like how succeed like how cultish should we be is there like there's a there's a scale for everything here so maybe it's maybe it's just like just on like onboarding enough people that like are kind of on the fringes that it's hard to see the center of the cult is it like do we just need people who are willing to take like two ass laps like that's it like and if that like that's the intensity of the cult that we should be striving for like someone said i've someone someone i don't remember who it was but someone's like uh

mmt or fiat is the religion bitcoin is a cult i was trying to like what does that mean is that and i was the way i interpret it is just the cult is a precursor to a religion right like they all start that way and if you look at how those things form like again talking about pemdos like maybe the cult is is the part of the order of the operations yeah this is cool i'm trying to think about like uh religious inceptions what is the oldest religion the oldest religion um zoroastrian exploration i'm trying to think so that's sort of like priest and marion yeah and that was very mystical religion i'm going trying to go back to my book that i read you go to um gilgamesh

indian religions and um i mean you yeah how i'm trying to think of how they start but you but here's one thing that was interesting again going back to my travels in asia was um you know buddhism was started in india zoroastrian astrology not exploration i'm sorry practicing could be called the exploration aspect of the astrology yes yes thank you for saving me like you go back to um uh in in thailand you know buddhism is is dominant religion in asia it's also uh massive but it's all started in india and it's it's um in india you see a lot of muslim and a lot of hindu and so you start to see how places where they begin can start to emanate elsewhere around the world via memes because you start to see um in thailand their

whole thing is uh every day of the week has a different buddha one buddha is happy and one buddha has a hand that's like stopping you from being bad one is like giving something to you and these are replicated across all of asia are you supposed to exude these values on these days i or you're some people are associated with them i'm again i tried to pay attention and learn as much as i could so there are much people better who could represent them but you start to look and these same images are replicated in other countries across you know southeast asia japan and and china but the buddha just looks maybe different maybe it's a little bit more plump versus thailand it's much more uh it's a thinner buddha some are more feminine some

are masculine yes and these are all just memes that go into their culture solidify in them to like bring what ultimately started in india and that even in india is not as big of a thing as it it's like anime yeah it suggests and so like i think here at that you know at the bent the origination of stacking sets all of these things this is the work that is needed to be done i cannot take credit for that that's all matthew it was not me well this is this is this happens at the um at the citadel we call tftc i'm anti-citadel i do not want a future citadels the future citadel seems despotic to me the freak citadel it does i agree with that i'm not i'm not pro it all that way i want a future where i could just live in northern california and live on a

vineyard and make dope wine have people come on my vineyard and talk about wine let's talk about wine i love that do you love wine i i i love wine i don't know um so we had this idea that i was doing before was um a wine club based on uh insurgent wineries around the world and so you have you know in lebanon you have literally you have wineries and that are in in palestine too they're in between the actual essentially dmz zones that are just the main work is just taking up shells every you know like that's part of harvest is like removing like military shells and things like that you have um in france in the languedoc region these guys are blowing up american and chilean and uh australian wine is being imported into france and diluting the

the the french wine mystique so they're going to villages and like blowing up wine containers and just flowing down like old medieval french villages talk about pity yeah i heard pettiness excuse me pettiness yeah you have uh wineries in uh south border of mexico in the um in the valley in the guadalupe valley right there that are related to uh zapata and the kind of movements across the border wine is is something that had been tamed so much that i wish that we need more memes and narrative to bring it back to its roots of uh of not only just like a base of civilization but like pretty badass right well that's that's why i like the california wine scene in particular right because they blew up on the scene in the 70s what was the ridge went to

the french tasting and won yeah uh they went there they also the french stays in california chateau montelena that one yes and i agree that's true now you'll go look at napa and it looks like disneyland french disneyland in rubber medavis yeah it just looks strange it looks strange so that's why i'm proud sonoma on the other side a little bit more down to earth um uh but that's changing too like speaking of just massive consolidation you know wineries that were run by family friends and families just scooped up by massive distributors that own yeah copain just bought a well yeah and that's like that's a that's a relatively innocuous version of this there's you know the massive distributors i won't name them but that could come in there and just

pluck up any old winery they want change the soul of it which changes the town and the area around it well this is a good microcosm of america right now right like oh yeah how do you preserve of sonoma's essence without being bastardized that's the same thing for like a bitcoin maximalist who's trying to like run a non-constant like how do you how do you always got to bring it back we'll bring it back right but like how do you like how do you stay authentic how do you so i keep authenticity i think it's natural progression is just what time of the era do you live in and we're seeing this now one of the coolest things that's happening now is like right now to spin up a new winery costs millions of dollars and like if you're if you're

planting it's at least three years before you're going to see any fruit at least three years probably five years and then you have to wait put the wine down so that's another like 24 months or whatever and so you're talking about millions of dollars outlaying capital to only be able to like harvest years years later so like for most people that have really badass cool ideas of what to do with wine it's completely outside of their ability and so what you're seeing in uh in the wine industry right now the coolest stuff is people going around and sourcing amazing uh grapes bringing it back doing interesting things with the interesting blends or just um uh you know no longer having this estate landed gentry model unfortunately because that was that's one of the

coolest parts about it um and moving towards this you know where you see the most innovation is people just finding the right the right grapes the right material bringing it back and producing really new exciting stuff and then the other part is just outside there is wine grown in every state in in in the u.s in india produces wine like we're going to see some cool stuff and it's not going to come from these places that have just like solidified into what it is i don't know but like nobody has the microclimates at sonoma does right well good but these these grapes that people get are coming from sonoma it's just they don't own the land okay and so they have more ability to experiment and like bring a bit more of like punk rock vibe back to back to wine growing like

you know growing up all the people in the wineries you know that i knew and i that was my first job i was 16 i started working on the wineries until i was you know 20 years old or so who are you i started out as a ranch hand at first like digging dishes and clearing suckers off the vines and then you know did other things across but that's where i started and um uh you these people like the stories would be yeah i you know i i was working in new york i had a liquor store that i had and you know um i just decided to head out head out west and i just like got this amazing property like pristine land and i just made it work i brought my family there and we just like made this into a reality it's so i'm so envious it's so fucking beautiful out there

it is like i can't like living in new york city being from philadelphia i will make my way back to philadelphia soon freaks don't worry the prodigal son will return i can't wait for it but like driving like the drive from san francisco to sonoma oh yeah it's one of the most especially if you take the back roads absolutely you cut through napa and then go to sonoma through that way it's it's fucking immaculate few eyes i could not agree more that's like that's just brings bad it's like that's that's childhood there and so it's it's interesting how it's it's changed but also just as like i hope you know like outsiders see that it's like oh my shit this is paradise like i mean like there's and that's been the truth you know you

had um yeah jack london uh you know the call the wild rider guy who's living in oakland and he you know found his you know found his wife and he's just like you know we're done with this and he got on like a wagon and just rode up into the hills and found Glen Ellen and Sonoma like right up kind of where I lived and just found this incredible piece of land started growing you know wine was one of the you know the earlier not the earliest because it was happening with the Spaniards and stuff but and just was able to create his entire life of his own and separate out there like this i can't imagine that happening anywhere in california anymore there's one of those stories that uh that property was uh uh then went into disrepair after he died

and this whole property you know burned down then you have like utopian communities moving in and like flourishing for 20 years they're hiding gold in the trees and you know they died in the trees oh yeah like that's that's how they were like hiding their money and then the next group would come and they'd find this gold and they would fund like some other you know part of their community there and they were all about you know you know whatever different utopian vision this is like one of the properties i you know grew up working on has a uh a greek parthenon there and they would just like do stuff there and so you go preach to the delphi or something like that and so it's just like this crazy you know this like it used to represent such a freedom of experimentation where

you could go out there you would be an hour north of san francisco but you were for all intents and purposes like experimenting on the other side of the world and you know that that feeling is 100 not there anymore and it's weird how the world seems so much smaller well that's what i was just about to get into like is there a frontier in america is america a great frontier anymore and then was america the last great frontier and then let's get cosmic here are we going to space next did we get that fucking board we're like fuck we've made some dope white and in northern california that was the last frontier you might be right about that that's like because i i do not want to live on mars i don't either i don't i'm not getting on that on that space i've asked

i've asked my wife she's like yeah not happening yeah i don't want to go i don't i like i'm i i would be happy like being that the captain on the boat like going down with the ship before i would ever like be like that's where my future is yeah i definitely go to space like one of the virgin galactic so the branson vision i like you know you go up a little champagne yeah you get a little anti-gravity and then you get a little existential like peek into your soul like oh yeah you have the you have the the i forget what the effect is called the astronauts come back with saying it blows your mind once you see the pale blue dot from afar yeah the scale of it all yeah the scale of it all the scale of it all god what would um fuck why am i forgetting his name uh carl sagan

sagan what would carl sagan think of all this shit that's going on right now so he i remember i saw some interview with um uh elon musk and he was basically talking about he was he was he was dictating um something that carl sagan said about the pale blue dot and he said pale blue dots from like still chills it's yeah you can think about and elon is like reciting it and he then goes and says and part of the pale blue dot it says and this is all we have and this is all we ever have And Carl Sagan's point there is, like, we need to work to be able to make this world livable forever, because this is all we have. And Elon was, like, in character reading it, and then he pauses and he says, well, that's actually not true. And then he goes back in, but he was trying to, like, lay praise onto Sagan and do all this, but he stops to be, like, his Mars promotion.

Sagan didn't know that my parents were going to fuck and I was going to be born to take us to Mars. exactly exactly so i mean like i i like i prescribed the sagan world vision like work to make this place work yeah for sure just be nice to your fellow human this is the only thing we got it's crazy like the pale blue blue dot if you freaks are listening to this i've never seen the fucking video go watch it right now it's the most humanizing video if you can live under the assumption that the the earth is round and then the universe is in a a simulation before you go to sleep turn the lights off cue up pale blue dot and then you will float into some some heavy space some heavy space it's all about perspective freaks what are we doing here

what are we doing here what the fuck are we doing here will i don't know i think i need some more mezcal you do i mean we can blame it on that for sure we're almost two hours in i'm still having fun this is uh oh whoa heavy pour there sorry honey i'm coming up hot and horny and that's what they so um mezcal one of the things they call i forget a minute the hour 55 25 oh my god okay what else do we got um so the mezcal um the maguey what it's made of the uh the the plant was considered like the cosmic plant because it's one of those things that the one thing provided everything that a a society of people needed it had food you can eat it you You can make materials out of it, baskets, rope.

You can make tinder. You can make mezcal. You can make absolutely anything, fire, everything with it. The mezcal's got your boy showing real good right now. Yeah, and that's like, I think what happens is it shows in the mezcal. Well, let's talk about the history of mezcal. You were describing maybe before we hit record, you've got a lot of warriors drunken, ready for battle.

Yeah. so uh let's see where do you even start with this so mescal like the hit when you talk about the history of mescal you're really just talking about history because it's pretty much always been used for this and so the the interesting part is when um around the mexican-american war a little bit before that you have these families up in tequila up in uh in mexico uh the salsa family you may know of the cuervo family you may be familiar with essentially all got together and as the u.s was building up this massive population of people they realized there was this huge market up there and so you know in in the caribbean people were

sending rum out there because there's such a big market for people you had over in europe they're sending gin out and mexico was like we got tequila this families could figure out this like you know whole new market to market to and so they started flooding america with tequila especially on the frontier and you'll go to tequila and they'll even tell you right now that the only thing that gave the americans the cojones to come and take the mexican territories was because they flooded it with tequila and they were all you know essentially white boy drunk you know and the alamo like fuck this exactly exactly and so it led to this incredible success in some ways and their downfall and others but they made so much money off of it they were able to create regulatory

capture with the mexican government and say we're going to pay you off this money and what you're going to do is define the only type of alcohol that can be uh exported from mexico is going to be called tequila and it's going to have these characteristics it's going to be from this place it's going to look like this it's going to be made like this and which essentially outlawed the exportation of all other types of mezcals tequila being one mezcal so this is like a Quasi-champagne? It's exactly the history of that. Exactly.

And this is the history of alcohol creating these. Some countries are better than others about creating these regulatory capture like this. But they're like memes at the end of the day. It's like you need tequila from tequila. You need champagne from champagne. Or we have to call it sparkling wine in California if it's not from there. Exactly. And so you have all these mezcal farmers who are essentially unable to make it.

But the interesting thing is that because tequila became so industrialized, the technology of producing tequila also started to move away from its roots. And so whereas before, all mezcals are normally, the maguey is cut down, they cut it open, they bury it, they burn it with coals underneath. that's why you get that smoke in it um and then they'll they'll take it out and then they'll basically press it and then ferment it when you have to produce on such a scale that doesn't work like that proof of work is way too intense yeah so what they did a small batch operation small batch operation so what they did was like okay we're going to create massive um factories that essentially steam the maguey en masse and so that's why in tequila you don't really taste the smoke on it anywhere the smoke in this mezcal is fucking incredible it's it's i like to call it the

the scotch of mexico it really does remind me scotch yeah and and so tequila essentially was like became a bastardized version of itself because of the monopoly that the salsa and cuervo families were able to create and in in oaxaca you have this tradition of small batch producers keeping the tradition alive and there are hundreds of types of mezcal good for you cuervo and and suerza you create some shit brands terrible brands was it worth it was it worth it you're you're you're the bane of every white girl's existence was that what you wanted to be remembered for oh god i mean so like i was i was down there i was probably i was down oaxaca maybe 10 years ago, and I was at this place called La Mezcaleria, and it's this place in Oaxaca,

I don't know if it still exists, but it's this bar that's run by a bunch of, a collective of mezcal producers, who are basically just trying to keep the art alive, and their whole thing is to map out, map out all of the different types of mezcals that are in existence, and keep the tradition alive against what tequila essentially did to it and i was in there and uh next to me at this bar was this uh this couple and they happen to be from new york and they had this bar somewhere on williamsburg i'm gonna track down the name and they were in there and they were saying oh my god we need to bring we're gonna bring mescal to the u.s and like we're gonna make this like an incredible um you know new hot thing la superior la superior and it was

no that's the restaurant i think you're thinking of is it so it's a okay and i don't know what it apparently it was also attached to this place where like bands would come and record like huge recording studios anyway this is all i'll give you the name after but they were they were there to essentially come down and be like this is a massive business opportunity the problem was that mexico never changed its laws of exportation on it and so it became this huge pain in the ass And so what happened was you have a bunch of these Mexican farm workers who are working in California at the wineries up in Sonoma and Napa who then saw this opportunity and says,

oh, wait, we have tons of wild maguey growing all over Sonoma, all over California. And so you started this whole new movement of U.S.-produced mezcal to get around these laws. like nieto wouldn't let people yeah there's a lot of there's a lot that comes directly from the u.s shit man and now guadalajara and now you know everywhere and even in the territory of tequila and so we'll see i think it's still dwarfed by tequila just like it is a tiny fraction of total sales but uh quantity or excuse me quality over quantity oh quality i i don't drink anything this is high quality right here yeah and so is the wine in sonoma it's like uh i'm gonna i'm

gonna send you a couple bottles this is uh turning into a wine and spirits podcast i'm very happy about it obviously it's been a wine and spirits podcast for a while but we actually never talked about the wine and spirits we've just imbibed it's always been underneath it all they all know it though all the freaks know it are we pretentious for talking about this like that's what actually i love about wine is it is very nuanced and it's very low time preference right you have to plan this stuff out that's why i love the wine world in particular i do but to the point i made earlier wine needs to go back to being more dangerous than it currently is because it does have this air of pretension bullshit snobbiness and that's not what it comes from at all well that's why i

the california wine scene in particular is because they are an affront to that that trend yeah and a front and a huge affront to that yeah right i agree let's hope it stays that way well you're worried about the fires right that's what you're saying how bad has that been what's going on with the fire situation with the california it's now at a point where people are saying i have worked my life i've come to california and always wanted to live here and always said i will always be a californian so now you have you're starting to hear things like if this has to happen every year and every year i need to deal with two weeks of like choking smoke how worth it is that especially when the fires are increasingly encroaching on where i actually live and so it's changing a

mindset of this so let's take a step back what is the situation like what has happened in the last five to ten years in particular that has changed the right because like fire didn't come out of nowhere right yeah um it all i mean it's all because of of zoning and planning and in my opinion there's again there's we as california continues to increase its you know people try to find their own little plot of of utopia like we were talking about earlier more and more of it is about finding all the last remaining corners of california in which you can build that and so there's money fueling and finding and building in those areas and so you build what maybe used to be small you know rural towns that are expanding out that start to expand into actual wilderness

that are just focused on building the services to to sustain that town but nothing about the environmental impact of the fact that that town is in the middle of a wildfire historic wildfire zone and so you you get this idea of like like high time high time preference planning just putting it out there because people want a place to consume and have this idea of what's the hot hot spot to be hot spot to be and then it it's like oh well historically there's been massive wildfires here every five years so what are you going to do about that and people find themselves just in the midst of it and yeah it turns into a situation where everybody has to help out the topic that i just got out of was uh one of the one of the like um most popular things going on

right now is this tool because everyone in california has a pool is this this uh fire hose that you put into your pool and you can personally battle the fire coming around you boss and the reason is because like when true ingenuity when fires happen in the area the water pressure goes to zero because all the fire engines are pulling from the pulling from the water sources and so like you as a homeowner that's something you don't think about no and you as a homeowner be like oh my god the fire is right there i'm gonna turn on my hose and do something about it doesn't work and so what happens is this new set of kind of tools are coming out of put it in your in your you have your water generator it's called your pool the water generator is perfect and you

put in your pool and they're the funny thing is like the marketing pictures of this are they're dropping a hose into the pool and they're like personally battling a massive wildfire which little rascals like taking down their clubhouse horrible horrible idea but i don't condone that you should leave but you know make sure you have insurance yeah i mean i honestly can't uh i i can't even pretend to know what that's like i've never lived through a quasi forest fire there was one time and i was in costa rica there was like forest fires near the surf resort i was staying at that's it ruined my surf for the day yeah it was fucking terrible goddamn costa rica sucks no but honestly like i don't like i can't imagine what it's like living

in uh an area in which you're like oh fire can just pop out of nowhere and fuck up my day yeah i mean it was definitely weird getting a call like 5 a.m seeing hearing like your mom and i have evacuated um you know we're going to this house uh if you come if you can get past the the um exclusion zones please go get these like you know uh um photo books for us you know it's like that's a strange thing to hear from like a parent you know and so it's like forcing this weird like you know dystopia on on the whole thing in an area that was like once like oh this is where you come to just have the good life you know and that comment in particular is like really highlights what your parents think of first like get my memories oh yeah happy memories

like fuck man it's so how how much does eucalyptus play in all this is that a conspiracy i you know i need to dive more into this eucalyptus thing i think i'm just not educated enough on it yeah but i know that they're highly flammable and the reason why people hate eucalyptus is because there's one of these trees that grow up as rapidly as possible have the lowest tree uh root base and so they inevitably just fall and they're just these like disaster things that can spread you know either you know even without fires but yeah exactly and so you know i'm going to look more into this i'll get back to you marty yeah yeah marty uncle marty's uh you and his conspiracies

these aren't conspiracy theories they're conspiracy facts Will, alright, you can let this grow in the way you just described it and just ramp it throughout California I have no idea I'm kidding, I was genuinely curious this has been a hell of a night

we didn't talk about Bitcoin for the last hour I don't think that's wild, and the funny thing is we tried to pull it back at certain points didn't need to go there we're so all right let's bring it back to bitcoin let's end it on bitcoin what are we're like where are we right now is like we're in the middle in my view we're in the middle of a bear market still um i think people are sleeping at the wheel i think bitcoin's about to surprise a lot of people

personally yeah i don't want to uh lead you to agree with me or anything but i do think right now i can just tell you i'm getting a lot of uh dms from people asking about paid groups and stuff like that uh the that is a surefire sign yeah and and again the development like things like polar yeah what's that all this like what you're building fold up like all this shit coming like it feels like individuals are more equipped than ever to use bitcoin i i completely agree the the if you think about the bull market like last time and people were like okay what do i do what do i need to do what do i need to have to get involved like that question is no longer there people know the avenues you have cash app where it's been in front of their face forever

people all know coinbase like the avenues in terms of immediate on-ramps are far more understood than ever before and someone described like the having not as a fuel to the fire but gravity reduced yeah who was that i don't know but it was really good i really like that as well apologies to that we're gonna get you and shout out in the show notes give me i'm gonna find this out right now but that was such a great like because that's everybody's like oh the happenings are was it might have been phil geiger from unchained capital might have been don't miss the tribute because i don't want to miss the tribute so it was exactly like i feel that is very real the amount of services that people have the amount of knowledge that people

have is more than ever before um and so i think when that does happen it's it's going to be it's going to be exciting but uh this was uh malik manikian right um awesome bitcoiner he's got the the lion in the red circle abby for those who are visual bitcoiners um no but it's true it's like it's not the happenings are not rocket fuel the gravity it's just like all right you have to live under this condition of the physics of the system now the system only delegates you x amount of coins per block reward until x block deal with it gravity just got a little heavier so i'm i basically i'm excited to uh um have a little lighter load be able to jump a little higher um and um you know honestly keep building this this this winter has been incredible like

you don't see this kind of work being done in bowls and so to have this amount of time heads down is why we're going to see this gravity come even like besides just the having like even more because of the services that are immediately at hand to a large group of people i think it's that i think it's so how can people help what you're doing help fold help the adoption of bitcoin let's see i think i think in general is to is to continue to be curious about what bitcoin can be and what bitcoin can do and hodl accumulate stack sats but also look to the use cases that are continuously building and that right now are stronger than ever and so i think with fold or any of the other stacking sat services like

just use them give them feedback like we our team lives and thinks about this all the time and take very seriously all the feedback we get we make changes on the fly because of what we hear from people and we the roadmap changes directly because of what we're hearing from the community of people using it so the more the more engagement we get the better um and i think that's true of everyone building in this space um and so you know fold is going to be is available for everybody now so uh go check that out but you know start experimenting check be curious about all the other builders and start using the services send some sats and stack some sats um and i think we're all going to be better as a result i do as well thank you for bringing this cow we crushed

more than half this bottle i'm starting to slur my words i think this is best to hit and on this recording where can we find you at wl rbs perfect at wl rbs on twitter well reeves fucking legend peace and love freaks