The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Bitcoin education and the circular economy (with Shay) | The CBP

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESJoining the CBP this week is Shay (https://x.com/shaylen_carson), who is making his podcasting debut! Shay has been covertly working on on spreading the good word of Bitcoin in Latin America. He is currently involved in the Puerto Bitcoin circular economy project in Mazatlán, Banana Tree Clothing company, and currently thinking about memetics, language, systems, and Bitcoin.So many folks in Latin America have seen their hard work and savings evaporate as a result of their country's poor financial and monetary decisions. Bitcoin gives a lifeline to these individuals, and it is incumbent on us to help spread the word.Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for 25% off fees FOR LIFE, and start stacking today.

Friends and enemies, welcome to yet another edition of the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast. I'm Len the legend and I'm going to be joined by Shae just momentarily. And he is currently in, well, I'll let him explain where he's located just in case I don't want to dox exactly where he is, but he's definitely not in Canada. But because of where he's located but he's definitely not in Canada, but Because of where he's located the connection is not a hundred percent So there's a little bit of a delay between he and I when we speak So just keep that in mind when you listen in or watch into this Interview and it's gonna be a good one because he hasn't been on a podcast before this is another one two weeks in a row

We're popping the cherries of people on their podcasting tour and so this could be good he's a very highly recommended by somebody Joey and I know quite well and because of that we basically rolled up the red carpet and want to bring him on he's very bright very intelligent and I want to hear his thoughts on a number of different things but before I bring on Shane talk to him two things I got before I bring on Shane, talk to him, there's two things I gotta check off my list of things to do. Number one, sponsor reads. Well, those are the two things I gotta do.

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Yeah, hopefully. How's it going over there, Shay? Yeah. Good. How about you? I'm wonderful, man. I'm wonderful. And I didn't say exactly where you're located, just in case you don't want me to say where you're located. Oh, that's all good. Yeah, I'm back in Canada now. OK, yeah. But typically you are where are you like a world traveler or are you just a home body always in Canada lately? The last few years I've been traveling around a bit and spending most of my time in Mexico through the winters, but I've made my way to El Salvador

a couple of times and through Guatemala so it was interesting to see the Bitcoin culture down there that's really nice. I'm gonna pick your brain about El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico in just a moment but before we go any further I want to inform everyone who the heck is Shay like give us a little bit of background who you are and maybe how you got into Bitcoin. Yeah, I'm born and raised Canadian from British Columbia and I used to work as an industrial electrician for over 10 years and then I got into Bitcoin in 2020 in the summer of 2020 I I had heard about it like everybody hears about it in the background and it was on my radar and then what really got me of course was the mining aspect of it and so of, of course, with mining, it connects energy and money.

And I didn't really understand economics at the time much. And so that took me down the rabbit hole pretty quick. And from there, I was just kind of obsessed or consumed by it, like everybody seems to be when they learn about it. And then I started traveling in the last few years and yeah it's nice to see the other cultures and how they've adopted it and how they view it because you know bitcoin is one of those things that it can be viewed. However you are, you'll see Bitcoin the way that you are from your perspective, I think.

2020 was a notable year for a lot of people and it opened up a lot of people's eyes to numerous things. Was this your introduction to Bitcoin? was that after Covid like I will say after covid i'm going to say after march 2020 because that's when the economies Worldwide seem to have shut down. So were you jumping into bitcoin after that moment or before it? Yeah after that around august. Um, I think it came on my radar around then Yeah, right and it was picking up a lot of steam and a lot, basically a lot of things were picking up steam just because of all the new liquidity that was in the market and the money had to park somewhere and part of it ended up in Bitcoin's lap and so the price pumped quite a bit. Now being an industrial electrician and your interest in mining you're mentioning is quite

high. Do you dabble in mining at all? No, I never yeah, I never got into the actual mining part of it, but the concept of it. That's what really drove my interest Just the fact that we don't usually associate money with energy anymore, even though We should because it is the input to everything all of our experiences is our energy over time and For some reason as a culture we we've forgotten that Yeah, so what's the disconnect like? How could we bring people into the realm of energy being money because for whatever reason that's no longer the case but given what's going on in the world, we see that money is being quote unquote

printed and inflation is up, people's purchasing power is getting wrecked as a result, not just in developing nations but even in the United States, Canada and other G7 nations. So what's preventing us from crossing that gap and having people understand that energy is money. Well, I mean, for myself, I naturally thought in systems thinking, like for troubleshooting and everything, I see things as a system. And so when I learned about Bitcoin mining, I would look at regular plug in the wall, and we purchase electricity. But we can't sell it back unless we create some complex contract with that monopoly, the service provider.

And when Bitcoin mining shows up on the scene, you can see that it creates a bidirectional, like it's a two-way function. And so when you use systems thinking, if you have bidirectionality, you have to expand your lens to see both sides of the system if there's that aspect. And if you look at history, this is what's kind of interesting to me, is if you look at how we usually evolve, we kind of cluj together, like we kind of fumble through every evolution in technology, and we just make everything work.

And so we have a lot of standards that are inefficient, that we always have to go and create interfaces that are backwards compatible until we reach a point where the standard gets so top-heavy that it collapses under the weight and you have to rebuild the standard. And so in this case this is what's happened with the fiat dollar is we've just associated and had the medium drift for a long time. And so we've kind of lost the message of value underneath it. That's usually correlated with it. And so when I look back and you can look at it like with the perspective of Bitcoin now, you can see that the problem that it solves is basically that you've got energy over time that it's

a dynamic. It's hard to track because it's always changing. So the market is always changing the subjective price of energy all over the world. And so to track that, you need everybody on board. So it's a bit of a paradox because Bitcoin right now is not actually tracking the price of energy. I mean, it is with quite a leg. But what would actually solve that is if everybody believed that it was, right? So money is a shared abstraction. We have to believe it to make it valuable. Well, we get to a point, if there's mass adoption, not just with using Bitcoin, but even using energy to mine Bitcoin, does that create a problem in the future, where then the consumer consumer such as you or I may not get access to the electricity that's being produced because that electricity is being diverted

for something that is potentially more lucrative, in this case Bitcoin mining, and that shuts us out from getting access to 24-7 electricity because that's what I wonder in the future that because as electricity prices continually go down through efficiencies and the price of Bitcoin goes up. I know mining also gets more challenging too and there's the halving and all that that just makes mining much more challenging but still the fact that you could monetize electricity I'm wondering if the electric companies are going to look at gee I can make more selling it by using it to mine Bitcoin by then selling it to an end consumer. Do you think this is going to be a problem for us moving forward? No, I think that at first there

were some instances where you were getting certain, like because the price is volatile, you can get peaks where and drops where the price could start to move in on other producers. But in general, it's so competitive that it's going after the lowest priced energy, basically waste energy and stranded energy, which I think it's counterintuitive for most people because we think of the energy grid as basically efficient on the back end, but it's extremely inefficient because we have to build out infrastructure far beyond what the amount that we use every day because we have to build it up to the peak demand. And so if you have, I mean I'm sure you've heard about it, but

you have a duck curve. So in the morning when people use lots of energy and then they go to work, they use less energy and then the evening they use more. And because you have to supply those peak demands, you've got a large empty gap in the middle where there's nobody buying. And the energy grid is still there sitting. And it's essentially anything that's not used in real time is wasted

because they don't have the storage for that. It's not set up that way. Bitcoin basically acts as a capacitor, much like a battery does, for load balancing. It's pretty fascinating because it actually solves more problems on the back end and it's probably going to be one of the things that helps with i mean climate change and and all of the efficiencies use of energy going forwards but i thought bitcoin was going to be boiling the oceans how could it be i'm kidding'm kidding. You mentioned waste energy that is stranded energy, essentially. I'm not sure if you studied this enough, but I'm curious if you have any idea

what is the majority of stranded energy right now. In my head, I think it is flared gas. It's gas that is being wasted on oil fields because it's just so far away from anywhere and there's no way that you could monetize that energy normally. So that's well, Bitcoin you can. So is that the majority of the stranded energy that is out there or is there something else that I'm missing? I myself haven't, I haven't run the numbers on it. So I don't know the total amount, but I think if you go beyond just the energy side,

because there's massive amounts of waste energy. I actually worked in the gas industry before with flare stacks, where they would burn off sour gas. And so the same thing. You're basically burning all of this energy that could be run through a turbine and then you could monetize it and it would clean it. And Bitcoin wasn't there at the time, the infrastructure for all of this, but now it's

happening more and more, especially in Canada, where you can create these, you know, secants full of Bitcoin miners and a gen set where they can send them out. But one of the, I think, things that we don't talk about enough in the Bitcoin community is all of the waste in plain sight. I think some people have mentioned it, but it's like, if you've got monetary premiums sitting on cars, houses, everything that is basically being used as a store of value, if you give something or you put something into the market that can store value better, and

take that monetary premium out of those, then those things can become less of a store of value and more of a utility again. And most of what we use or have is not being used 100% of the time, so the frequency is extremely low. So I think it will increase the frequency of use of all of these things sitting idle in our day-to-day life. Well, and how about governments? Do you think that they're going to be adversarial for some sort of adoption of Bitcoin in this regard? Because it seems like any sort of

adoption of Bitcoin is at the detriment of the fiat currency that they administer. So I'm wondering if governments are going to put up roadblocks moving forward and saying or at least indirectly try to make it more challenging for Bitcoiners or people to onboard into Bitcoin. What are your thoughts on that? I think initially they have, but governments are made up of individual people like you and me. And once you run the numbers and you see the science and the math, they work. It just, it works, then they can't really argue with that. And I see it more like, if you've ever read The Internet of Money by Andreas Antonopoulos, you can think of the idea of the medium and the message. Once you separate the message from the medium. For example, I like to use the example

of the copyright industry, because I'm a millennial and I watched the copyright industry kind of get disrupted in real time and you get to see the message, which was the music, be digitized and stripped from the medium of CDs and anything that could be copywritten. And then of course we pirated all of our music for a while there. And then what happened? Well, you broke the monopoly on that copyright industry

and they capitulated and they went to subscriptions. And so they repackaged that message and they gave you the benefit of, you know, all the music you could want for a subscription fee, along with the ability to interface with it and share it with friends and do all sorts of other social things to change the message a little bit. And so Andreas Antonopoulos points this out and he says that we always mistake this cycle. And I would say that this is going to happen much like that with Bitcoin because once you strip the message of value from the medium, then governments are going to have to change and capitulate because it's essentially the sovereign individual thesis

where all money will flow out of the country if you're hostile towards it and you're going to tax it compared to other countries that might not. So it inverts the tragedy of commons because everybody's sitting on real estate and With real estate you don't have optionality. You're there sitting there getting taxed over and over again but with Bitcoin it is not attached to the medium and so it can flow across borders and They will start to realize this which I think they are and this is why I think We're close to a tipping point, where you have the nation-state game theory play out,

where it inverts from the tragedy of commons until those monopolies on property rights are flipped. And then they change to much like, I guess, Balaji. He talks about the network state, if you've heard about that. So that's the idea that you would subscribe to as a citizen. And I think that we're just around the corner from something similar to that. And I just want to double back, were you old enough or are you old enough to remember the Napster days?

Were you alive? Were you around? Were you cognizant at that time? Were you involved? Yeah, my brothers were playing with that a bit. But I remember streaming music on BitTorrent or U-Torrent and all that. That is a shining example of what happens with decentralization. It's impossible to stop that type of service because there's no central entity that is providing it. It's merely peer-to-peer. And that's where Bitcoin is kind of another example. So I look at that, the BitTorrents and everything along those lines, and compared to Bitcoin, there's a lot of similarities between the two of them. And it seems like to me, there's no stopping it. Governments could put restrictions, they could put up whatever roadblocks they want, but it really will just be more, if anything, temporary and maybe just a little bit of short-term pain for Bitcoiners.

In the end, there's no way to stop this. Capital flight will happen regardless. They may stop it a little bit, but I think in the end, it would just happen regardless. There's just no way to stop this. Now what we had in Canada, I'm not sure if you followed it, we had an election not too long ago. Did you follow our Canadian election? Yeah I did. I voted as well. Oh, okay. Perfect. So are you? I don't really subscribe to the political,

like politics won't fix it. I think that it's a little deeper than politics. But Carney, I'm looking at Mark Carney, our current prime minister. Can you still hear me there? Yeah, I can hear you. It's cutting in and out, but I think it's stabilized now. But with respect to Carney, our prime minister, I think he's a known Bitcoin. And I'm just going to paraphrase here.

I'm not trying to put words in his mouth or anything, but I don't think he's a fan of it, of Bitcoin. And I'm just wondering what's going to be done moving forward with respect to Canadian laws, Canadian policies, regulations towards Bitcoin. I don't think anything's going to happen, but still with somebody in power that doesn't align well with Bitcoin, I mean, at least that's the way I understand it. I just wonder if things could change moving forward with how we deal with in Bitcoin in Canada Any thoughts on that?

Oh, do we lose you Oh, no, I think we lost Shae Right in the middle of our political discussion, too, I was going to get deep into politics. It of energy, like I'm oh, can you hear me? Yeah, it's really like now, I think it's about 20 seconds or so. You may want to cut off and come back in and try. Oh, man, can you hear me now, ladies and gentlemen?

Yeah, I can hear you. I think it's just very, very lagged. So, yeah, sorry about this, folks. Yeah, just can't hear me. I'll just stick. Stay around then. Yeah, it's just you just log in and log back, log off and log back in. Hopefully that will resolve the issue, but Sure, we're just getting deep into politics and you know what for everybody that watches this show and listens in it's one of the things

I love to discuss I love to dive into Because it has shaped our lives here in Canada, even though it's very difficult to participate. It seems like it's a Even though it's very difficult to participate it seems like it's a System for you know the in crowd and I'm definitely not in I mean anything but that but still I like it's it's like a Drama for me. Some people like to watch stuff on Netflix. They binge watch videos Netflix. Some people like to just watch movies I like to watch politics for whatever reason specifically Canadian politics, but Shay you still there? Oh for whatever reason, specifically Canadian politics. But Shay, are you still there? Oh, man.

I think we might have lost him. Let me just, yeah, he just jumped out. Let me just see if I can bring him back in. You there, Shay? No, you know what I think this is done oh Man okay. Can you hear me now? What I can hear you back on did you hear me? Okay? Okay, yeah, I can hear you yeah, sorry about this connection issues. It's okay. No, it's just it's very delayed We'll just do what we do. I was asking you

The question to do with the Canadian Politics because we have Carney now elected and he doesn't seem to be all that friendly to do with Bitcoin So is there gonna be in your eyes? You think there's gonna be anything that's gonna make it more for? Bitcoiners moving forward with Carney now as a prime minister Right, yeah, I like to see this as that narrative follows Energy or price in this case because the price is a reflection of the energy behind it lagging and I think that as time goes on, no politician is going to be able to argue against the adoption of Bitcoin when nation states start adopting it.

I think that you can look at it more like a scaling conflict or scaling issue, like we know about in Bitcoin. Everybody's always arguing about scaling, how to scale properly. And I see this, if you zoom out and you look at how society has scaled, I think that you can see just money in general as a scaling solution. And as it fails, people start to go back and argue about socialism, capitalism, et cetera. And as it fails people start to go back and argue about you know socialism capitalism

Etc and Bitcoiners they say Bitcoin fixes it and I think that that's what we're gonna see going forwards is that Nation states are gonna start competing and then if you're a nation state that doesn't compete your citizens will start to Leave the country and take their wealth with them will start to leave the country and take their wealth with them. Now with nation states, it doesn't seem that we've taken a step backwards because El Salvador up until recently was the only nation out there where you could potentially spend your Bitcoin and it was accepted within their borders, but now they made a deal with the IMF and they're no longer allowing people to pay taxes to the state with Bitcoin and they're having vendors make it an option if they want to accept Bitcoin. So this seems to be a step back. Now, does that mean it's going to be a little bit longer before we have another state decide to do the same thing because the IMF they obviously dislike Bitcoin and the countries that are gonna do something like this are gonna be

developing nations that are gonna be using the services the IMF so how do we get over this hurdle? I think that that all arose because they went a little too fast I don't really think that it they needed to make it legal tender. They could have just said we're not going to tax it and just let people adopt it as it is, as it's an open-source tool. And I think that that is the way that it will be right now. And I don't think we need their permission. Money is a language. This is what I subscribe to. And if you go to Guatemala, they use it as a currency there

in that circular economy. They still use it in El Salvador. I don't think that the government is being completely honest, because it looks like they're still stacking Bitcoin, even though the IMF deal says that they can't stack Bitcoin. That's a hard one. And I don't pay attention too much to the politics on that side of it. But it's still still happening. The adoption is happening. The other place, small country, Suriname. I think that that would probably be the next one to look at.

I mean, adoption is happening happening in circular economies all over. But from the top down, that might be the next top down unless we see acceleration in the US doing the reserve and then everybody gets the, you know, the go go ahead to to adopt I have a sneaky suspicion the u.s is probably gonna uh put Trump coin on the reserves before they put bitcoin I don't know if that's the case just but but with respect to serna there's a political candidate

I'm not sure and I think it's a she I it could be wrong. Yeah, mine is her name I think and is she running for like top office either president or prime minister or is she running for something far as I know I think it's her present. Yeah presidency. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, and she's a She's very fond of Bitcoin. So That's a good we don't talk a lot of Surna But yeah, that is potentially one that could be the next one that does it and you mentioned Guatemala and you've traveled to Guatemala that you mentioned so How is Bitcoin being used over there? Is it improving people's lives?

Yeah, it was interesting to see because there's it's known as Bitcoin Lake Panahatchel it's a town with around 17 other small towns around the lake. And Panahatchel is the main one that you arrive to. And so there's a community leader, Circular Economy, he's organizing it and teaching at the local schools. And so we got to meet up with him. His name is Elias R. He's a great guy. And he toured us around and we got to sit in in some of his classes and see it. And I think there's

about 60 to 80 places that currently accept Bitcoin and rising every day because he works full time on the project. And it's quite something. It, you know, everything takes... It's all about education. And I think that's why I see it as a language, right? You can't just start speaking it. You have to spend some time and translate back and forth and figure it all out and see how to incorporate it and how it'll fit into your life. But yeah, it's pretty incredible to see. You don't really have to, there's not as much unlearning in

the North America. We have to unlearn and convince people that there's a problem. But there, if you talk about corruption or anything like inflation, they already know it's a problem So it's pretty much just just the learning aspect. It's not unlearning Are they more inclined to use a US stable coin because the US dollar does retain its value relatively well compared to other fiat currencies and I asked this because in that neck of the woods a lot of people are living from hand to mouth so you don't have the ability to put away any sort of savings they're basically whatever they earn is

basically used for feeding themselves for a day or for paying for shelter or whatever so is is that causing people to use stable coins more than Bitcoin? Not as far as I've seen, but I've heard that people prefer them in other countries. There, he was primarily Bitcoin focused and he was pretty adamant with his education as well because he understands Bitcoin and they don't really... once they're looking at a digital unit of currency, they're probably either going to be in their local currency or Bitcoin. But it's... Yeah, I think that stable coins will play their part in this transition, but I don't see...

If we get to this tipping point, I think that if you don't have large drawdowns, and I see it more as a technology adoption cycle, where you usually get an S curve. So at a certain point, I don't think we see so much of an effect on the cycles. And as people see it gradually and they understand the issue more,

there'll be less volatility volatility to For them to deal with so I think that you know, why would you want to hold a so-called stable coin? What's not really stable, right? Now in terms of having Bitcoin get into the country I think a lot would probably be through remittances and along those lines. But that may not be stable for long run. And so maybe I'm going to tap into your past as working in the electrical field as an electrician. Mining Bitcoin over there, I'm not sure exactly these developing nations if they have excess electricity, but that would be if they have the ability to

generate electricity for cheap would be one way to accumulate Bitcoin and Do it on just with very little effort just simply set up some sort of power generation station Set up a mining rig a few more bunch of mining rigs and then away you go is Do you see that being as a future for a lot of these countries out there, specifically like Guatemala, Mexico, and to a lesser extent El Salvador, because they seem to have shelved their ideas to like do their mining with the Bitcoin, what is it, the volcano shit. So like, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, I haven't been up to date on their volcano mining, but in Guatemala, I mean, at least with Eliasar, there's actually a video, GetBased, I haven't been up to date on their volcano mining but in Guatemala, I mean at least with Elie's are he there's actually a video

Get based I think that a documentary there and they showed him mining Bitcoin with cooking oil Like you used cooking oil that would otherwise be thrown out Yeah, I saw that video generator. Yeah, so he's got that diesel generator set up It wasn't working when we went there sadly I think they had an issue with with the starter or something but I I didn't get to see that but I know that they they were running and mining that and It just goes to show How much waste energy is kicking around out there and we don't think about it because

Originally there was no way to monetize this stuff But yeah, I think that it it will gain traction bit by bit. It's going to take a lot of effort for people, plebs like you, in particular, to go out there and educate folks on how to do this. So can you still hear me there? It just seems like a bit of a lag. It's a bit of a lag. But no, it's fine.

It now comes to a point where we just have to educate folks on how to set up mining operations, and that can be a little tricky. Initially, it seems rather simplistic, but still there is some level of maintenance that needs to be done. You've got to make sure that all the equipment is running. If there is some breakdown, say a fan or a hash board is down, they have to have some technical knowledge to keep things running at peak efficiency. So I think it's incumbent on us to teach people how to do it and to get them up and running. Similarly, because you spend time in Mexico, what's the situation over there with, oh shoot, I lost you oh hey we lost him again oh man so sorry about this ladies and gents this is a because his connection is spotty right now he is

using the Wi-Fi off his phone so he's tethering off his phone he initially tried to use the Wi-Fi available his residence to connect in but it was not very stable at all and initially we had even using the video but it just wasn't working so I told him just turn off the video we'll go audio only and he's back you back Shay? Uh-oh. I think we're still having some... I think we're still having some... On here.

Can you hear me now? Oh, this is... Yeah, it's super lagged and the connection's not 100%. Oh, let's just plow through this thing. Because you spent a lot of time in Mexico, and maybe you could talk us up, like, whereabouts in Mexico were you located and Maybe you could talk about the Bitcoin economy over there Yeah, so

The last two seasons I was in Jalisco like near Porto Vallarta and I spent one season up in Mazatlan and so my girlfriend's actually from Mazatlan we were the one we were traveling down to El Salvador and Guatemala and so she's Started to see what kind of interest there is there and started a circular economy Puerto Bitcoin in Mazatlan and so she's starting to do Monthly meetups just to see what kind of interest and help help educate people from you know

The basics and so it's great Pablo from bill bull Bitcoin was Helping us organize some of that and it's great. That's a Pablo's a gem now a Great. That's a problem. The jam now. A2K Nexus on YouTube is asking, are you hiring laugh out loud? So if I'm not sure if you are, but if you are hiring folks over there, he may be interested in joining up.

So is there any opportunity for expansion? Yeah, we're not really running much of a business. One business that we did start is a clothing business because my girlfriend, she makes clothing for a living, custom clothing, and she has a clothing shop. Banana Tree Clothing Company. When we went down to El Salvador and Guatemala. That's right. Yeah, exactly. And so lately we've shipped some hats down to sell it,

Me Premier Bitcoin and the Bitcoin hardware store in El Zante. And so that's pretty much it, but we're not, sadly I can't hire anybody for doing all that stuff. That's just starting in. But I love the interest. I'm sure if you visit any circular economy, they'd love to just meet you and spread the knowledge, right? So the folks that you're talking to down there and trying to educate them on a Bitcoin, what sort of way are you having them secure their Bitcoin?

Are you having them install Blue Wall wallet on their phone or something else? Because you're starting from scratch with people's knowledge and they could easily screw something up. So I'm curious what tools you're using over there to have people store their bitcoin. Well initially they're small amounts and so to get people started within minutes it's always been the easiest is just onboarding them onto lightning wallets, custodial lightning wallets like wallets, Satoshi, obviously Bitcoin Beach, Bitcoin Jungle. They're great. I like Bitcoin Beach and Bitcoin Jungle. They've got that learn to earn option on there. So it's in Spanish

as well, right? So you learn about Bitcoin and you earn some Satoshis on the way. And it's great to get people to see it because for them, the interfaces have to be built out for user. The UX has to be nice and easy to use. For Custodial, that comes a little later. And I'm hoping that we'll see more lightning wallets incorporate self-custody, which I'm not sure I saw a few things on wallets as a Toshi pop-up, but I haven't seen them actually incorporate it into their wallets

But yeah, it's a long process Phoenix wallet has I haven't used Phoenix wallet in a long time, but I'm wondering if the application has something to allow you to do some sort of custodial holding of your lightning. Because the only way I know right now is you have to run your own full node, your own Bitcoin node. And then on top of that, your own lightning node. And through there is where that's the way I always learned it is that's the way custodial

lightning is done. But yeah, it's got to be the easier just they got to find easier ways of doing this because it's well it's challenging to run your node yeah lately actually on bull Bitcoin and Aqua wallet are are great because they kind of created a stack where you can use lightning to liquid and then go right on chain for low fees. And I think we're gonna, I think Bitcoin's price is holding back a lot of innovation

because once the price goes up and people get pretty excited about it, you're gonna see engineers chase those opportunities and create the interface, like goes back to the innovation cycles where the interfaces have to meet somewhere in the middle with education, right? Right now, we're spending more time on education and less time on interfaces. But when the interfaces come out, then we'll see, see kind

of it's like the Internet of money thing. It's the the thing that I always thought it to be the easier it gets to use The less likely you're gonna be holding on to your corn It's gonna be somebody else that's gonna be maintaining it but yeah, the the UX certainly has to improve because you're seeing it you're trying to onboard folks on a Bitcoin that probably have some technical knowledge, I'm guessing and Then you're trying to use this magic internet money and using the interfaces that are available to us right now

that's going to be a huge challenge isn't it yeah well it's gotten a lot easier really but again people once they notice that the price goes up, especially in a bull run, they're reluctant to spend that Bitcoin without, unless you tell them you can replace it and they've got an easy way to purchase Bitcoin or source it out. They understand that they want to hold on to this stuff too. And so I think we have to reach that point where the overlay of the Bitcoin network, you know, as a monetary medium, has to kind of go on to the clunky rails of the fiat rails and the banking rails. And, you know, this is what we're seeing now is the, you know, sailors bringing Bitcoin into the fiat world in many ways. He's really making Bitcoin a topic on Wall Street, but I've talked about him at length

of my concerns with him. I don't think he's a spook or anything. It's just, man, you have the ability to secure your own Bitcoin. You don't need somebody else to custody it for you. You have the chops do it, you know, and also if, you know, if without even doing that, let's at least first provide us, um, addresses for what you own. So there's, there's proof that you own it, but that's tough for another time. I just want to talk about, talk about scaling because that's a topic for another time. I just want to talk about scaling because

that's something else you mentioned. And I hope that maybe we could do a deep dive into this because one of the difficult things with Bitcoin to really just to wrap my head around is how it's going to be used as more people on board it. Layer one is not efficient enough to have billions of people use it and even another option out there like lightning doesn't allow us to adopt billions of people because again layer one it's it's only limited to how big the block size maximum four megabytes so it creates a problem about scalability and with Bitcoin. What are your thoughts on how we're going to be addressing this issue?

Well, I look at what Jeff Booth is doing. He's leading the way, investing into companies that are on top of Bitcoin. And that's a great example, I guess, with Feti and all those. But I think, like I just, you know, I finished reading the Internet of Money again, like I've read it a few times, but I, he talks about scaling, Andreas Antonopoulos, he talks about scaling in there. And he references the way that the Internet scaled, you know scaled back when there was a couple web pages, and that was the internet. And it happened in basically cycles.

And everybody would always say, there's no way to scale this. And then there was always some way to find a workaround to scale it, because humans are innovative. And so I see this happening over and over again. And as the need for it increases and the money's there to create that, and there's an opportunity in the marketplace, I think that I've got a lot of faith in the marketplace

and human innovation to overcome all the scaling issues. I can't say I know exactly how they're going to do it, but I see that there's going to be the incentives aligned for it. The one thing I fear is there's going to be people that are going to try to take advantage and there'll be scammers and shit like that. And they'll try to propose something and push something that may appear on a surface to be something that works and it's good for the masses. But in the end, there's some ulterior motive that's behind their moves.

And that's the one thing that when I see something, I try to look at it with a skeptical eye. I'm always a glass half full kind of guy, I guess, especially what's happened the last few years. My faith in a lot of things has been just whittled away to just a nub. It's brutal. But before, I mean, before we wrap stuff,

our talk here up, I just want to mention something. You talked about memetrics. Did I say that right? Memetrics? Or memetic? Memetics. Memetics. What is memetic? Memetrics or me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me Oh, losing you again. And it was a metaphor of the metaphor for the selfish gene. So it was a metaphor of a metaphor.

But no, we're losing you. It became You know Oh, hopefully you can hear No, it's cutting in and out. I don't know if i've cut out i'll keep talking and hope you get the message, but um Let me know if you're not hearing anything. I can hear you now. Um But the the meme, um Can Yeah, okay.

Damn, because I'd like to hear this. This me me medic thing. Okay, I'll try and log it log out and log back in here. All right. OK. OK, if you can hear me, I'll keep talking about the meme. Yeah, keep going. OK, so memetics, the meme is a cultural unit of information. We pass them around. They're jokes on the internet, and they spread virally. But I've taken this idea of memetics, and I don't really subscribe to the fact that it was... that it... I think that it predates the gene. Essentially, information existed

before the genetics. And I think that the meme is basically just a compression protocol for information. And also that it's a different framework that you can fit a lot of other concepts together. And the big one for me is language and money. Because they're often referenced as the same thing. But obviously money is a little bit different. And the connection go into a bit of the psychology, like causation versus correlation. Because with the memes drifting, in language you can have something called linguistic drift. So throughout history, language drifts. The syntax, the structure of the words shift, and they form more slang, and the semantics also drifts because the words like nice in the 1800s was something like foolish, and

now it's more like pleasant. But that's just one example. And if you broaden the idea of language, you can start to see that everything is essentially language because it's a communication protocol and it's how we relate to everything. And if you go back to the idea that everything is a protocol, well, then you could say that almost everything has syntax and semantics and a gradient between them

as they change. So they're a dynamic between them as they change. So they're dynamic system, so they change over time. And that is, it's always fascinated me because that linguistic drift happens, but there's something called linguistic relativity. And it's the way that language shapes the way that we think. And so the language we use changes how we think. And if you look at the hierarchy of money, money shouldn't be in a hierarchical state. It should be a flat network more like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is peer to peer at the flat network. But because we've lived in a society with money as a language for so long that is hierarchical, we have incorporated that into our psychology. So our psychology is basically a master-slave system. And so, depending on what side of the system you're on, you will have a superiority or inferiority complex. And given your situation, you'll express it that way. And so sadly, we've got an entire culture with these psychological complexes. And it's an interesting framework,

because once you go into this memetics, it drove me right down to understanding, well, not understanding, but describing awareness as a protocol, which is, you know, another layer. And if you look at that and you take that same example of the syntax, the semantics, and that gradient, you can look at awareness and say, well, that was either, that was supposed to be a flat network as well. And the way that it's corrupted, you could say, or compressed, is through your self-concept. So your self-concept is a compression of your awareness, right? And so just like you have, if you speak English or Spanish,

you've got different protocols to, of your awareness, right, to interact with other systems of awareness. And so this, I mean, it gave me a broader framework of understanding not just Bitcoin, but the idea of what opting out is, because it's essentially exercising your ability to have agency again. And so most people are actually controlled by their compressed self-concepts, their ego. And they're not usually able to opt out of their ego. Unless they hit a wall where their ego doesn't conceptualize

their reality very well, and then they have to break it and rebuild a new ego or you know, you could awaken and Be more, you know aware and you sit in that state of awareness, you know so Yeah, I've brought you this. Yeah well, I read a lot so Bitcoin is

it drove me to read as many books as I could get my hands on, as it usually does for everybody. But I just wanted to understand things through a systems thinking lens. And once you apply systems thinking, you, systems thinking is basically the ability to zoom in and zoom out of a system to see the boundaries and change the boundaries and What I actually saw happening recently which you know reading Richard Dawkins work and biology and memes and All this you start to go into seeing patterns and in Psychology, so so there's two disruptions that I've noticed that are happening beyond economics. In psychology, about 80 to 100 years of psychology is being disrupted by this lady, you know, you might have heard of her, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and she's kind of leading the way on that. And she's basically applying systems thinking to the brain and her studies.

And it's completely opposite of the way that people think because she describes emotions as something the brain constructs in a predictive way, which goes against all previous thought because we think there's a spot, a place in our brain that says happiness, a place in our brain that says fear, right? It's not like that. It's an emergent phenomenon. And that's pretty profound. But then you go into biology and you see that the same thing is happening with a guy named Dennis Noble, who worked with Richard Dawkins for quite a while on and off. But he subscribes and he's written books on living systems and he's basically applying living systems thinking to biology.

And that's disruptive because that's going against the gene centric view. Whereas, you know, it's essentially reductionist theories, domains, basically having to expand because once you see that it's a bi-directional system, right? Not just a bottom up, it's like the genes don't cause everything. Because if you took a gene from you, and you um, tried to recreate you, you couldn't because it's a path dependent person, right? And so of course there's epigenetics and all of the top down. So it's a bidirectional. And so same thing. So as

long as you can zoom out and see that there's this holistic view, then you can't subscribe to those reductionist views. So I see it as all of these things are happening around the same time because we're finally getting a new framework to apply. And so my idea was, why not apply that to spirituality, or religion, or awareness, like the things that we want to answer about ourselves?

And I just wanted to understand all of these things. I'm not specifically religious, but once I see it as a system, I can see these things as placeholders. And it just makes a lot more sense when it, when I can describe it this way for myself. If I like to write about it for myself, you're passionate about this. Would you say the selfish gene is one of the top three books for you?

The selfish gene was good, but it, it, what struck me was when he mentioned mimetics. And then I realized like, it doesn't make sense that, um, that you could come up with this cultural meme and lay it on top of this network and not say that it predated the gene. So I don't, it's a contrarian view and I don't think science really incorporates that but I think it makes more sense for myself just because you had energy, you had mass, and their information, right? So of course it's gonna predate the gene, right? But as to the book, oh sorry, yeah.

Go ahead. Yeah, I think it was a good book, but there's some books out there, I can't say I have a favorite book, each one I kind of I go through books extremely Fast in order to get a broad idea. I don't really like to dive in too much because I think that there's a huge benefit to having like the beginners mind or you know, Like a polymath kind of idea to it where if you dive too deep into it and you become idea to it where if you dive too deep into it and you become Reductionist then you're not gonna see the broader view and I think there's you know The downside of that is you could come off like what is that? Terrence Howard or somebody and and and go in and think that you know everything

But I I just try and sift through it from first principles as much as possible and go with it How fast does it take you to read a book? You say you read it pretty quick. I'm curious, like what's an average length of time for a decent sized book? It depends. I mean, I used to read a lot more. I would train myself to read or listen to audio books two to three times speed and sometimes more.

But it's just to get through it because I like to read a few books at a time and not like deep, right? Of course, if you're listening to it fast, you're going to get, I try and strip the message from the medium essentially, and then at least you've got some part of it to apply. And if you read a few books at a time, then I don't think there's any other way to you're going to get a different perspective. Right. Paper versus Kindle versus audio, which is the best audio, I think it's the quickest, most convenient.

I mean, I like I like to read paper books, but that's just just for the different experience. Yeah. See, for me, I find a paper to be, I could retain it way better than I could, the Kindle for whatever reason is the, like, it's the least, it's the one, the medium that I could extract the least out of it. Audio is pretty good but still for whatever reason the paper is number one for me but maybe I'm just different I don't know but and it's really when I listen to audio I'm not doing the two or three X. Yeah no I subscribed to I don't really like Kindle I bought Kindle you know out of convenience when there there wasn't another copies available of books but yeah I think yeah yeah we're at the but

an hour so I just want to respect your time plus I have to go see my wife in just a few minutes I got a wrap this yeah don't worry whatever whatever works for you so all good I appreciate you coming on number one but number two if people want to reach you because you you're fascinating individual you have a lot of interesting ideas how can people reach out to you if people want to reach you because you're a fascinating individual, you have a lot of interesting ideas, how can people reach out to you if they want to get in touch with you? Yeah, you can message me on, I guess,

xshalencarson, I think it's shalen underscore Carson. The link is below in the description, so I added that so it's there. Yeah so that that works pretty well. That's probably the easiest way to get a hold of it. Well, Shay, I appreciate you coming on and we popped your podcast cherry so I hope you enjoyed it. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed it as well. Ap gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed as well apologies for the technical difficulties but we managed to do what we could and

Yeah, that's basically it and we'll be back at this again on Monday. So with that take care Hey, thanks so much Len. Thank you. Take care