Bitcoin Pioneer: I Was Paid 100 Bitcoin An Hour When It Was $10 | Ep. 443 with Charlie Shrem and Courtney Shrem "Prince of Bitcoin"

0:00There was a front cover page of Bloomberg where I was like throwing money in the air and it was like Bitcoin millionaires. The moment I got arrested. We got surrounded at JFK Airport. Courtney, when you met Charlie, you know you're dating chaos. I honestly didn't know what I got myself into. Charlie Shrem got paid 100 Bitcoin an hour when Bitcoin was$10 and Courtney made history's first Bitcoin transaction. then the DEA surrounded them at JFK. I actually did the very first Bitcoin transaction to be accepted in a nightclub in New York City. Did Bitcoin make Charlie a better man or nearly destroy him?

0:40Nearly destroyed him and then it made him a better man. Satoshi left Bitcoin too when he disappeared. I was one of the people that...

0:54so it's great to be with both of you again how long has it been oh my gosh when was the last time that we saw each other in person so you had us on a panel in la i think was the first time and that was no i think it's 2021 i think that was like a film festival in can yeah that was the first time that was the first yeah it was the first time every year over and over again in can but uh you guys ran an event here in la a couple of months ago i think it was around ai or something maybe a year ago half a year ago i don't remember i think it's 2022 i have some oh wow that's how it's like as you get older time goes on you know how it is the time just time is great i don't even understand sometimes i look back i'm like wait a minute am i 21 oh no i'm 42 yeah yeah is this really happening is this the matrix are we really here i don't even know sometimes i wonder but it's great to great to see you guys again the interesting thing is there was a vice documentary that came out after we all met so i have to ask you this Were you a genius, lucky, or just early?

2:09I was having a conversation with a friend today about something like this. And I think it's really about luck and then not being afraid to go after the craziest opportunities that you see possible. and then just finding yourself in a very uncomfortable moment where you're constantly waiting for something like really good to happen. And where, you know, like you're putting everything on the line, your business and starting companies, it's like high stakes poker. So getting involved in the early days of Bitcoin and becoming the Bitcoin prince, I mean, you're right, there was a front cover page of Bloomberg where I was like throwing money in the air and it was like Bitcoin millionaires.

2:52And, you know, I was sitting there thinking that everyone was my best friend and had the first Bitcoin exchange, founder of Bitcoin Foundation. I was one of the people that Bitcoin left, Satoshi left Bitcoin to like when he disappeared. But, you know, when I got arrested and the whole story came crashing down, the only person that was left taking care of me was this one over here. So, I mean, it's crazy that you think you're on top and then you very quickly can go down to the bottom and you it's a beautiful way to live life especially at a young age because you get both extremes and it's like even in moments like when you're waiting you know that you're dealing with or whatever in normal life you've always dealt with something really much worse yeah which led to my next question courtney when you met charlie did you know you were dating chaos.

3:42I honestly didn't know what I got myself into. No. As soon as I met him, I knew that I was in love with him. He just had a certain different energy that no one has ever had before that I met. And like, we just hit it off as friends very quickly. And you would start to visit me at EBR and request the same table and for three months, and then we were set up on a blind date. And And everyone, they're like, I was working at EBR at the time as a waitress. And I was getting ready to leave for the night. And his best friend, my boss at the time, that owned EBR, was like, we're all going out for drinks.

4:21And Charlie may or may not be there. And I was like, okay, cool. You know, no one admitted that we liked each other yet. And we were supposed to all go to the same establishment. So we all went. And Charlie and I were the only ones there. Everyone else. Yeah, everyone else. No one else was out. It was a setup. No one was going to make the move. And so we ended up having a great night that night. I did throw up on her after like the third or fourth bar. And then when I went downstairs and came back from the bathroom, she was still there cleaning up, you know, explaining the situation. I'm so sorry.

4:51I love that first throw up. She's as my back, no matter what. Like we just met. And I was like, this only can go up from here. I'm so sorry. He's so nervous. And Courtney is a really, really smart person. And she comes to a lot of my business meetings. and the craziest thing sometimes because she's a great judge of character and knows, like, she, Courtney gives a great perspective of the situation that we're in a lot of the times. So, like, even, so even today, some members on my board will be like, let's get Courtney's perspective on the situation or something like that. Like, if she, like, if we have a business dinner, they make sure, they will literally point out and say, is Courtney going to be there?

5:32it's like because it's a part of the of the shtick in in these like you know these like work relationships people like it when you you kind of it's uh you're you're bringing them into your friendship or your family you think there's a women's intuition because kate also i don't people i could get scammed and i'd be shocked she's like no i knew that was a scam over the phone i said don't do a deal with that it's bad and and i'm 99.9 percent i save him a lot of grief and money same same situation i've lost a lot of money not listening to courtney and her mom a couple years ago on like a certain business relationship and they told me like outset and like every step of the way and i fights about fights about it all the time and i was like no no like it's gonna work out and i was so wrong and i'd never again yeah it was bad like you said life's all about learning lessons um you guys told us this story when we first met you about how much Bitcoin you were getting paid and how much Bitcoin you were spending.

6:34It was like, I wrote down here, 100 Bitcoin an hour. And I might be wrong on that. 400 or 100 Bitcoin an hour. Do you ever think back to that time? You're absolutely not wrong. Remember the champagne? Oh, you had the champagne showers at EBR? Yeah. Yeah. What is the champagne showers with Bitcoin? I want to know. How do you stop at that? So EBR was the, I don't know for anyone that knows our story of how Charlie and I met, besides being set up on a blind date. But I actually did the very first Bitcoin transaction to be accepted in a nightclub in New York City. And then that's how we met. What year was that?

7:07That was 2015. What is EVR? What does it stand for? It was a club. It was a nightclub. It was for two years from 2012 to 2014. It was one of the top nightclubs in New York City, like lying around the corner. And it was built by a couple of friends. Yeah, right beside the refinery. And it was the only bar. It was the first bar in the world to accept Bitcoin. and so you asked about like hundreds of bitcoin an hour which you have people that would come in and they would spend like thousands of bitcoin and buy one guy would he's crazy he would take a cart of champagne bottles because you know champagne a nightclub is expensive expensive so it's$1 ,500 a bottle plus the price of bitcoin is$10 so 150 bitcoin for a bottle of champagne so it's a thousand dollars and we had a bitcoin transaction system and like i can still log in and see those old transactions and you'll see them.

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10:26Then that obviously then crypto, like so much has happened since 2012, 2014. It's not even 20 years. It went from nobody really even knows what this is to basically worthless to changing the entire world. and not just the Bitcoin, just the community and just everything around crypto fascinates me. Yeah. You're absolutely right. And it was a social experiment before I really was money. Yeah, it was like a friendship. I first got into it even before doing the transactions, you know. So for me, I went to the very first Bitcoin conference in 2013. Oh my God, you were the only woman there probably.

11:05And I was like one of four because everyone else was a reporter. I could guess who the people were there. I could get yeah it was like all geeks and misfits but so was I geek squad in geeks and misfits like we figure out ways to to become I'm boring I think she was like one of yeah she was a reporter actually became like a head of a top uh crypto lobby but it's like so all these a lot of the CEOs of these the big exchanges today like Kraken and Coinbase and and all these companies were started off as just like nerds in at the Bitcoin conference that Courtney was at and we only took up like a quarter of the room right i was like dancing in the corner it was a crazy situation but what i liked it too and this is like what fascinated me about it is because i didn't really know too much about it because like falling into it and then learning as you go and it's just it's really interesting because like i said because it's a social experiment it was like there was no judgment it was so innovative like the energy when you go into that room it was beautiful The world is amazing.

12:08We can do anything, you know, and it wasn't dangerous. It wasn't because there was no stigmatism on it. No one was paying attention to us. There was no attention. You couldn't get Bitcoin in a media article. There's nothing. It was like emptiness. We were our own thing. And it was really beautiful. I just tweeted a picture the other day that I missed the good old days of the early Bitcoin meetups. Like, there was people walking in off the street post-Great Recession. People were all about it was a community of financial sovereignty. Everyone involved in early Bitcoin days. These are people, you would say that everyone involved in early days of Bitcoin came with like a massive chip on their shoulder.

12:46And everyone was like wildly self-sufficient in their own way. Look at Courtney. Like she left town one way train ticket, moved to New York City to follow a career of acting. When we met wildly self-sufficient person, like on her own, doesn't need anyone to help her out. I was leaving. I left my family. So I had been cut off from my whole community and family friend. So I was also struggling. And all the early Bitcoiners also were these very types of people. So and the banks, they never wanted to work with us. So we had to be very innovative. We had to fly around the world. We had to make relationships.

13:22We had to build new plumbing. All the Bitcoin financial infrastructure, the community, the conferences, ourselves as investors, everything, the media, we all did it. We self-sufficiently did it. And it was very important. We didn't have any help from the outside world for a long time. It was only until later did they pay attention to us. Well, can you take me back, you guys putting that very first Bitcoin conference? Oh, my gosh. what's a thought process there like i i know you wanted to to create this community but like can you tell me the why aside from what you mentioned it's a funny question because it's the it's the only motivation for me when i was starting the bitcoin foundation everyone had the bitcoin foundation was let's get anyone who has some semblance of like organizational structure or reputation in the community that they're in.

14:16And let's get everyone together and let's form like an association, like a trade group. And I was like, I just want to do a conference because I really enjoyed hanging out with people on the internet, but I wanted us to all get together in person and have a reason to, Courtney and I, to fly out to California. And we have friends all over the world too, which is so beautiful. We would never have met you if we weren't in the community. And it's just, it's crazy. What was that first conference like? What did we... wild. No, it was just, like I said, it was just really positive and people were just in a good mood.

14:48People were selling t-shirts. They had a lot of paintings. It was culture. They had a rapper come on and sing. He was wearing an anonymous mask and his name was like Chow Tonged and he was like the weird Al Yonkovich of the community. You can go to his YouTube and you can listen to all of his songs. They're like 2011, 2012, 2013. He's there, but he's not making anything new. He's A lot of the early Bitcoin community made money and have decided to kind of like recede into the darkness because you don't want to be targeted. I don't know if there's a lot of kidnappings in Europe. It's very dangerous in Europe to be a known Bitcoiner.

15:26The French government like sells, you know, the tax rolls to the mafia there. It's very bad. So you have to be very, very, very scary situation. Or be anonymous. Be very anonymous. Yeah. I seen. I went to prison. So like, you know, take my social security number. I've seen, I've seen, we can get into it. I've seen the video though. I saw like Vitalik there walking around. I saw like the guy from Coinbase. All these people walking around and they look very young. Did you see any of these people and think like, wow, these people, this person specifically is going to change the world. No, yes. They were all a bunch of Elon Musks.

16:04Like Vitalik, we were all really good friends. Courtney and him were friends. We all tried lobster together for the first time in New York.

16:14But weirdos who are wildly self-sufficient are people who are visionaries and will stop at nothing. If they have some motivation that they're motivated in, like Vitalik was so motivated by this ability of doing smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. And he wanted to build it on top of Bitcoin. And the Bitcoin community very mistakenly was like, no, no, no. Bitcoin should be only transactions, no smart contracts. And Vitalik said, all right, I'm going to go launch this on my own network, launch Ethereum instead. But he was very, he ran Bitcoin magazine, Vitalik. So you knew these people were going to be very wildly successful.

16:53And you don't want to like put up obstacles in their way. You want to encourage, encourage as best you can. Same thing, right? Same thing in your industry. It's you've got to just keep encouraging, encouraging. Yeah. Don't lose that drive. Yeah. Dan and I always talk about the world is run by geeks and pretty much. Not wrong. People on the spectrum. People on the spectrum. Everyone's a little bit. It's a real spectrum. I'm just saying it's deeper. It's a superpower. The ones who are running it are deeper on the spectrum than maybe some of the other people. Yeah. I will share in prison, I met some people like that, though, who did it for the dark side.

17:32and those are some really dangerous people. Like people who can use their autism superpowers for the negative, it's very dangerous. How was that experience? So let's take to the darkest moments that you both have had. How was that? What was your darkest moment? JFK Airport. The moment I got arrested? When we got surrounded at JFK Airport. We were only dating in eight months. We were coming back from Amsterdam and my mom and a family friend was actually with us as well. Last month, I called an airline to move a flight. 10 minutes of whole music, a robotic voice asking for my confirmation number, then a real person asking me for that exact same number.

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18:56See how Eleven Agents can fit into your workflows and help build experiences that your customers will actually love. Elevenlabs.io slash founders. E-L-E-V-E-N-L-A-B-S dot I-O slash founders. And you were speaking in Amsterdam. I gave a talk at a conference. Like talk about going back and forth really quick. I was on the front page of the Dutch newspaper in color. Like, it was crazy. The juxtaposition of the high to the low. No, I never translated, but now that AI... I've said that before because that's literally right before. Juxtaposition of like highs to lows, like front page of the Dutch newspaper.

19:39But yeah, I'm sorry for interrupting you. No, it's okay. So we were coming back from Amsterdam and we got off the plane and we were in customs and they were so nice to us. It's like, how was your trip? You know, yada, yada. Then all of a sudden, I see this person just put his hand up. And then all of a sudden, I see somebody else put their hand up. And they all start running. What's going on? And then I see, and then everyone just surrounded us. DEA. It was like a movie. They like got their positions in advance. It was very scary. Yeah, and it was like a federal, federal like agents and the, you know, escorted.

20:19it's horrible it kind of read me the arrest rights and everything asked courtney to go claim my baggage and then shuffled me in handcuffed into like a black suv kind of the rest of the night was like if you think of like a montage in a movie like sweeping gray multiple cells probably three or four different cells that night by the time i made it to my ultimate like resting place cell it was like probably four or five o 'clock in the morning and we'd gotten I got rested at 6 p.m. But the final resting place cell that night was a solitary confinement in the dungeons of New York City at the MCC. And it was...

20:55How about diesel therapy? Yeah. Well, then the diesel therapy is when they put you on a bus and then they kind of never let you land in one place. You just get shuffled diesel bus around from week to week to different prisons. So you can never position yourself comfortably and then you're just always on the move and it messes up your brain. so it's like a whole it's a whole thing that's what the inmates call like diesel therapy and uh so i was in solitary that first night and uh but luckily you were there you were there at my bail hearing and everything like whoosh what a crazy night that night was it was over 10 years it was a long time ago now like 13 probably 12 13 a whole lifetime ago 12 13 years ago but um but it just it descended that night was like the first band-aid pull of darkness but it literally that it just was like constant darkness for a good seven years with streaks of light you know sprinkled in threads that you can kind of grab onto um but i really am grateful that i got arrested at such a young age because you know i guess when you're young you're just an eternal optimist about everything and you just like look at it we talked about grand theft auto earlier i looked at my whole prison experience is like i'm living grand theft auto i'm living this video game and this is just a cool story like even the most dangerous dangerous moments which you know you have a bunch in the prison system you're still kind of looking at it's like oh i'll get out god is on my side you'll be fine like even in like it's like almost like in the moments like where you see the violence in front of you you see the you see it you it's right there you don't even believe it's real because i just didn't grow up in the world that i ever thought i would ever quit a prison so it was like i never felt it was real and i feel like we watched you know if something would ever happen to you god forbid you wouldn't even see it coming so why like kind of worry just like gotta go through i you know what i mean yeah and his optimism is really what kept me through it all like and even my mom she she can vouch for the fact that like for as calm as he seemed to be, or I don't know if it was a show you were putting on to keep up.

23:12No, it wasn't. You just have to make the best of it in there. You know, what I'm saying is your optimism is what kept me together because if you weren't positive and I wasn't positive, it would have been. I know. I looked at everything with very eternal optimism. Like there were very bad moments where I could, it could have, the way you look at things like for example, something had happened where I lost my I was teaching students GED training and I really enjoyed it because I was working to help students get their GED very close to where I was living on the prison compound and something had happened where the job was no longer available they had too many people or whatever and I'd lost that job and you know they kind of snickered like oh they're going to send the Jewish kid over there and they're going to send me to like drive landscaping and the snowplow and everything.

24:03And they sent me to do this very like out there and they knew that I wasn't gonna be able to communicate with Courtney because when you're close to the prison where you live, you can write more letters, you can write the email thing, you can get on the phone, you can communicate better. But when you're out running these other jobs, you can't do that. So, but little did I, I looked at it as like, oh my God, I grew up in Brooklyn. I got to drive a snowplow, a street sweeper. I'm mowing grass. I'm alone for seven hours a day driving my truck on 5 ,000 acres. It was like a gift to get me. It was the biggest gift I could have done to get me out of the compound where fights were happening daily.

24:44So now I'm driving my own street sweeper. I mean, you cannot have. I would have paid for that. I would have given up anything for that. It was the best gift. But how some people shit is someone else's like gold. You know, it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. you know i'm really inspired by that courage and like that muscles of like man i i want to learn i want to learn like what goes through your head like do you practice like how do you because like charlie one of my number one nightmare is i'm gonna make something do something that i will make a mistake and i'll be in prison and i i told dan like i don't know how i'm gonna handle it myself.

25:24I don't think I can take it. Like that's my number one fear. So it's not an irrational fear, by the way. A lot of people live through this like imposter syndrome. They live through this, like these are very extreme anxiety, irrational fears. Like, yes, it's a very, especially after COVID. It's a very common thing today. And Courtney, how did you, I mean, aside from Charlie's positive energy and just have that strength, like how did you get by? It was tough. Just keep yourself busy. I ended up working in a winery just so I could get him paychecks for commissary. You had given up a crazy career acting.

26:01I was acting in New York before I met him and during. You did a movie in Denmark? Yeah, that was the start. That's crazy. Thank you. But you know what? It wasn't the right timing for me. I needed to be there for you and for us and for our future. And I knew I was right about you. And I know everyone else used to fight me on it. But I knew that you were a good person. Love you. And loved me too. And, you know, I think it's been a learning experience for both of us. I mean, it's helped our relationship. It's helped, you know, communication with each other. It's understanding, you know, more of different perspectives of each other.

26:41And, you know, we grew together in there. yeah we do together with everything i felt like i was in prison too courtney mentally put herself in prison with me yeah i would try to live at the same time you were going to sleep we woke up together every day we watch the same shows we would um do the online uh yeah the online letters thing the monitored they do this thing where you can write like yeah and stuff like that we would i'd visit you when i could um every three every for seven eight hours straight and we're playing spades and we're eating a jalapeno cheeseburger out of a vending machine and we're going so do cheese doritos in the middle of it to give it some texture of my of my month when courtney would come no but you know and we brought my grandma before she passed and she was there for you a lot of friends came and visited like really like they i had brother courtney's brother came sister-in-law they came international friends yeah it was in support that corny would like organize other people because to get a visit and it's very difficult you have to file there's a federal paper you have to print it out fill it out hold background check mail it to the federal government then they mail you back and you have to coordinate with the inmate like he has to approve you there's a lot of coordination to just you can't just show up at a visit so courtney like was had this coordinated system people were sending me money and books and things but just the visitation.

28:06So I never knew who was going to show up and it was great. And I had friends from Austria come visit my friend, like, and he'd like look around and he'd say, Charlie, where do you guys do like the sexy time? And I was like, Tom, that's, that's state prison, bro. Like they don't do that here. You know, I'm always looking at where founders can actually build something. So let me tell you about what not. I got on the app and started out browsing luxury watches then somehow ended up in trading card unboxings. And before I knew it, I was watching live shows for new electronics. That's the thing about Whatnot.

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30:55In the middle of the parking lot. My prison khakis. Like. Alone. But we weren't that late. No, you're like. I mean. You've made it. Maybe 15 minutes. Probably looking. Counting the second. But it mattered because you're. I was getting released with friends that I was like very close with in there. And these. These were my brothers who. We looked out for each other. And we. Just by the stroke of luck. Because we were in this like kind of. We're in this like. Cool cognitive behavior therapy experimental program. that was phenomenal in the prison system. And so we got all, like three of us got released on the same day.