How Bitcoin Is Changing the World | Erik Hersman, Phillip Walton, Eric Yakes & Mark Kamau

13:19Eric Yakes:That was the crazy part is just, it's like within all of northern Kenya there was I don't even know like I felt like we drove through like 10 to 15 different just like it looks like a completely different country in a different part of the world and it's just like you drive for 30 minutes through this like very harsh desert and then you enter this like beautiful oasis and then we go up into the highlands and all of a sudden I feel like you know me being from Colorado that was one of the first thing I noticed was a lot of the vegetation up there was very similar to like what I'm used to in Colorado and I was like I would never would have guessed I'm in Africa up here.

13:51Eric Yakes:And we hit all of these different places. And yeah, it was wild. I think seeing the most interesting thing to me, I feel like that I learned on some of it was, and when we were talking about this when Philip and I were when we met the community up in Saru, if these people have basic needs, then it gets them to a certain standard of living where I almost feel like, you know, when, where we come from in the U.S. and we have all these people living in apartments and they're sitting in this box and they're looking at their phone all the time. And, um, and we have all these, you know, mental health crises and all these things that are happening nowadays.

14:32Eric Yakes:And you see these communities and it's like, oh, this is, this is how we evolved to live. And this is how, what we're used to. And I was blown away at how happy a lot of people were in these communities and the way that they were interacting with us with each other. And I was telling Philip, I was just like, honestly, I'm like jealous of a lot of the connection that you can see that they have. They have these very compact communities. Everybody knows each other. You know, all of those 40 little kids running around. Like the second we hop out of the cars, we're getting swarmed. And Eric was the main attraction.

15:04Eric Yakes:They somehow all congregated to Eric. Yeah. This Eric.

15:11Mark Kamau:That's quite interesting though, because Philip, you were talking about this, how community, like what we think of as community in the West is very different how they view community out there. Like in what way?

15:20Eric Yakes:Well, I mean, we saw it. So one, think about where in the West would like an entire little town allow all of their children just to run around, go up to strangers. You know, there's no parents around. But what was interesting at one point is they did start to cross the line of being pestering. Yeah. And a guy came over and made a single call, and they all just scattered off. So you can just see that there's an expectation of the whole community is interacting together at every level. And it's not like my pocket and your pocket. Right, because in the Western world, at least, people have communities around churches or some other organization that's involved locally.

16:09Eric Yakes:And that's fine, but I think the difference is when everybody lives with each other like that, there are no secrets. Everybody knows who each other are, and they're right around the corner. And I think that really changes the dynamic with how they interact with each other. It's a very real and authentic community that you're seeing.

16:25Phillip Walton:And you can also see it in the decision-making. So let's say you come to me in Nairobi, and you say, oh, you don't have electricity, I can give you electricity.

16:34Eric Yakes:Right.

16:34Phillip Walton:the knee-jerk reaction in an individualized society is, oh, install it in mind first. But when you go to these communities and you say, oh, we have a project where we want to electrify your community, the immediate reaction is wait and speak to our collective decision-making structure. So that's why we had to wait until we talked to the elders who represent everybody. And that is instead of a person saying individually, oh, come, let me show you where my home is where you can install electricity. It's like they think about the common good. And so they say, let's look at this as a holistic benefit for our community.

17:15Phillip Walton:And let's discuss it at a holistic level and how it benefits everyone. And that's a different way of thinking about the community first and not self first. So it says, wait with however nice your project is. Electricity is amazing. But before we can make a decision, let's first consider everything for the community. And we have a structure to do that. Let's use that structure. And for me, that's beautiful.

17:40Eric Yakes:And we saw this with the elders. So Eric and I got to go sit down with the elders. And literally, the only question we ask is, is there a piece of land that we can put this on? And these guys, they're old guys. they're sitting underneath a tree in the shade, chewing mirah, which is like this stimulant. So it's a plant that's grown in the north. And they're just sitting there like chewing these leaves and spitting them out. And most of them didn't say anything. I mean, they just kind of like sat there. You know? And then, you know, the senior guy, and they were speaking their local language. So we didn't understand a word they were saying.

18:21Eric Yakes:But you could just see this interaction, of this older guy. It was like almost argumentative, you know? And then this guy would like give a response. And then occasionally one of the guys that's just sitting there chewing these leaves would like say a word or something. And, you know, at one point I kind of felt like maybe it was going sideways. And then all of a sudden like, okay, we've made a decision. This is where we want you to put it. And they immediately walk us out to this plot of land. Like it was quite incredible.

18:46Mark Kamau:So I realized I've done a really bad job as the podcast host here. Philip and Mark have never been on the podcast before. So Philip works at Gridless with Eric. Mark, you're like OG UX designer out of Kenya, doing a lot of stuff on Bitcoin now. So there's the context. But the thing that I've also missed is why we were even in Saru. So maybe, I feel like you should explain, like what are Gridless trying to do out there?

19:07Eric Yakes:You know, so Gridless, we started out by focusing on finding stranded energy and helping to monetize it with Bitcoin mining. But we very quickly realized that the real need in Africa is developing new energy projects. And so we've kind of been focused on predominantly finding hydro. And we've been pursuing hydro simply because of unit economics. So it was a couple of months ago, Eric and I got on a call with some folks down in Namibia. And basically, they enlightened us that the cost of solar and storage has come down so much that we're approaching the same unit economics of hydro. And for those that don't think of Bitcoin mining like this, it's just energy, like it's an energy arbitrage.

19:52Eric Yakes:So Bitcoin mining pays X, as long as Y is substantially less than X, then you make gross margin and you can, you know, successfully fund this energy. And so, you know, we started down this road of like looking at modeling out, can we do solar? We, you know, with Bitcoin mining, we really need them to run 24 seven. So obviously storage is required. And then a few weeks ago, Eric took his family just on kind of a fun trip up to this part of the country and ended up finding this little village. And so we're like, this is perfect. I mean, this is a village nobody will ever, ever, ever think about taking electricity to.

20:31Eric Yakes:And we can go there, build a pretty substantial energy plant. It will make sure that they have as much electricity as they want for, you know, the next three or four decades. And we can do that profitably because of Bitcoin money. So it's just a great story.

20:48Mark Kamau:So that's a really important thing, I think. And we've talked about this on the podcast before, Eric, but this isn't like a philanthropic play. Like there's massive benefits to the local community, but you're doing this because it's highly profitable.

20:58Erik Hersman:Yeah. I mean, nothing we do, like, I think some people look at Gridlist and they'll think that we're a nonprofit or a charity. We are a for profit VC backed company. We are, our first goal is to mine Bitcoin profitably. And we do that by pushing energy to the edges in Africa and decentralizing the Bitcoin network. That's the whole mission of Gridless. So we would never look at a site if we were going to make money. Yeah. Right? So this idea, we were talking to this actually in Namibian, a very large scale Namibian solar guy who told us about the new pricing changes. we like triple verified this with different Chinese manufacturers, European guys who knew the future.

21:39Erik Hersman:And sure enough, the prices have dropped. And so in Saru, we're like, okay, this community might start with like a demand of maybe 20 to 50 kilowatts. But we can drop a megawatt in, right? Now, a megawatt of solar only gives you about 250 kilowatts of always-on energy. because if you have a megawatt of solar, you know, three quarters of it has to fill the batteries during the day. And so you can only use a quarter of it to mine during the day and then all night you can run it, okay? So it's a one to four ratio basically. And, but the numbers work. The numbers actually work finally. The economics work.

22:16Erik Hersman:What's interesting about that though is it means like what we were doing, Gridless is known for run of river hydro. That's what we mostly do. We have a couple of, we have a geothermal, we have a biomass, but really run of river hydro is what we're good at. And as we start expanding across the continent, we're saying, hey, we're gonna have, you know, about maybe 10 to 20 megawatts that come online over the next year or two. That's great. Can we double that now? Because solar is a lot faster. We can put up a solar site in three to six months. Whereas with hydro, you're looking at, you know, 12 to 18.

22:51Erik Hersman:So there's something really interesting here. And it's like the numbers work, the economics work for the Bitcoin mining, Even if nobody were to buy a single kilowatt of power in Saru, which we wouldn't like, right? But even if nobody did, we would still be profitable. Now, if they buy, we make more money. So the incentives are aligned for everybody to come out looking good on this. And if they pay more than Bitcoin mining, right, their price is still going to be less than what we pay in Nairobi. So they will actually have some of the cheapest energy in the whole country.

23:25Mark Kamau:Well, this is one of the things that shocked me because what's the town called? It's about an hour away from Saru. So Dukana Dukana and so there they have a solar site set up was that from an NGO? Yes, okay, and then they set that up and then there was some controversy in the town politics got involved Well, and now they're paying 72 cents a kilowatt hour.

23:43Erik Hersman:Yes 75 cents

23:44Mark Kamau:So that's like I don't know four times as much three times as much as a normal us household

23:49Erik Hersman:Well, and it's in Nairobi. We paid 25 cents a kilowatt Crazy. So it's three times as much as people in Nairobi pay on the national grid. But the reason that happened is this NGO set it up and then they weren't really monitoring and managing their stuff very well. People started tapping the line and stealing power. So they turned everything off. The community became a little upset about that. The paying customers did. And they said, well, stop these guys from stealing. They didn't stop them from stealing. So eventually what they ended up doing is just saying Fine, we're gonna turn it back on but we're now raising the price from 50 to 75.

24:29Mark Kamau:Yeah Crazy and like these towns don't have tons of spare capital to be spending that much money on electricity So I assume what happens is just people who use far less of it and then the benefit is obviously Way small way less.

24:41Erik Hersman:I mean so you're you're dealing with the people with them with the least amount of Disposable income in the country and they have the highest cost of energy crazy. It's ridiculous It's upside down.

24:51Mark Kamau:And so they're paying$0.75 a kilowatt hour in Decano. What will you be able to offer it to the local people in Sauer?

24:56Erik Hersman:So the wholesale price coming out of where we are will be something like$0.12. Now, that's wholesale. Sorry. We had a little bit extra noise around here. So let's say we wholesale it to$0.12 to either the community co-op or the local little mini-grid distributor, right? He might charge another$0.05 or$0.06 on top of that. So let's call it$0.18 total. and then he makes a little profit, so he adds another two cents. So even if you were to charge 20 cents or the local co-op were to do 20 cents, it's still cheaper. Significantly cheaper. It's actually 20 % cheaper than Nairobi.

25:31Mark Kamau:That's amazing. And one of the interesting things was in the school, someone had put a solar panel on the roof, and I think the only other place that I saw with solar was the pharmacy in the village. But the solar on the roof of the school is nowhere near enough. He said it can only actually light two of the classrooms, and they had eight or something. And the interesting thing as well is they're not just using it for that. Everyone's going there during the day and charging their phones and external batteries. And then in the chemist, he said, or the pharmacist, he said that it doesn't even run the fridge all night.

26:03Mark Kamau:So they are vastly underpowered. It will make an incredible difference to that community.

26:08Erik Hersman:Yeah, if you have no cold storage for medicine, if you're having a baby at night, you're doing it under the light of your phone flashlight, right? If you want to study at night, where do you go? So everybody, everything is worse when you don't have energy, right? That's it.

26:26Phillip Walton:In fact, when we were interviewing the community to find out what having access to energy would mean to them, one of the people we spoke with is the headmaster of the school. And when it's exam time, he literally has to carry his printer on the back off a bike all the way to ducana to print the exams yeah that was the exams at the school and he's like yeah if you brought us energy that would actually help because of that and even the vaccines so for young children some vaccines uh require refrigeration and they have a small solar fridge and the capacity that they have and you you had all of them say they get very cheap chinese batteries which are super expensive 320 dollars and every year or so they have to replace them and so for them they're like if if you could take that cost out of our hands with a reliable source of power that would be a game changer there's even there's a guy who was telling me um i was i was like he's got the business where people were having alcohol and he's super entrepreneurial it was like listen i actually don't even like selling alcohol my my main passion is welding and there are all these bikes that are beaten up and on this terrain can you imagine if i set up a shop to repair the bikes welding the frames that's actually my passion and so it's like if you immediately come over with power that that would would be super helpful but i think for me we've got some serious background noise going on yeah so yeah you're right like there are so many ways for health, for education, for nutrition even, because there's somebody who said they only slaughter a goat strategically.

28:08Mark Kamau:Yeah, because they don't have a fridge to keep.

28:09Phillip Walton:Yes, they don't have a goat. They don't have a fridge. So they actually don't even provide the right nutrition because of some of these constraints.

28:17Eric Yakes:So another aspect that, you know, when you look at like these solar home systems, these like rooftop, tiny little. It's like the bare minimum electricity to provide function, but it's not an abundant power. And I think the difference in what we're talking about with Gridless is going into that community and not giving them just enough to survive, but going in and making enough electricity available that the welder can actually set up a business because he has reliable power that he can run his welding machine, he can fix bicycles. and I think that's one of the challenges in some of the efforts.

28:54Eric Yakes:And Eric, remind me, who is the organization that counts like solar home systems towards the energy? Oh, that was Power Africa. Yeah, so, you know, their numbers sucked. Like they're not, like all of the effort that's gone into bringing electrification to Africa has failed. I mean, you know, and so in order to make their numbers look better, they changed the definition. you know it's not it's not real energy access it's like but you know there's a solar panel nearby so we're going to count that as being as being energy access and i think this is where we have to completely change the narrative you know there's no reason that a community like saru which is unheard of not on the map like i there there probably are other than the people in saru and maybe a few people around there probably nobody else in the world has ever heard of it until right now like you know saru is being announced to the world for the first time but um why why do they not deserve to have the economic potential that abundant energy abundant cheap energy would bring and and let's see what they do with it yeah of course they do

30:01Mark Kamau:but the interesting thing here when we were talking about this a little bit is like the philosophical implications of of them having like abundant energy like that's real africa that's how Africa's existed for however long. But if they get abundant energy, how does that change the community? What happens there?

30:19Eric Yakes:Well, yeah, and on that, because that was one of the questions I had. It's like, let's assume we have just a complete abundance of energy in one of these communities now. They're able to have refrigeration. They're able to create these basic necessities. They're able to have more entertainment because of it, all these different things. What are they constrained by then? What's the next follow-on? Because it seems like one of things i was noticing culturally is that people have time that's not a scarce resource in these communities they have time to do things and and i think that's because people are less less less punctual because of that and um and the question is is okay well now that if they have enough energy to where they can actually be leveraging their time more efficiently um then what are what are going to be the constraints in terms of being able to do that like so if we take the guy who wanted to be a welder for example you know where where's a lot of the inputs for his welding gonna come from and in like I was curious as to how like what would be the next step that they would need if they had abundant energy and then what would that allow them to do to really like you know not industrialize but you know what I mean have some sort of greater degree of sophistication around how they're running their community we've actually seen this to a certain degree.

31:31Eric Yakes:Danny's seen it in Bondo on Mount Melange. You know, like that's, that is a similar kind of socio and economically positioned community that has now had electrification for, you know, a decade. And I don't know about you, but I mean, just like interacting with the people, there is a lot of similarities.

31:51Mark Kamau:Oh yeah, totally.

31:51Eric Yakes:You know, and even interacting with the elders, there's a lot of similarities in talking to the elders that are on Mount Melange in Malawi and the guys that are sitting up in Saru. So I don't think we're going to take away something from them. I actually think we're going to catalyze them to continue to live the lifestyle that they want to live, but have that ability to keep food fresh, keep vaccines.

32:20Mark Kamau:But I don't think you're taking away anything either. It's an interesting dynamic where they're essentially being teleported from the same way they'd have lived 500 years ago, basically. to the modern world.

32:31Eric Yakes:Probably 5 ,000 years ago. So it was wild.

32:34Mark Kamau:That is like an overnight shift in how their society works. It's going to be really interesting.

32:40Phillip Walton:Yeah, and they get to determine that for themselves, right? Yeah. And that's the experiment. Because that's the experiment as well. It's for them because different people pick different priorities and we don't dictate what they do. And then you try to... For me, that'd be a very good experiment, like you're saying. imagine if we took this trip five years after getting adequate power yeah and what would we observe what are the differences we'd see right and how would they counteract any potential uh you know opportunity i mean how would they take advantage of the opportunity of power right right

33:14Eric Yakes:what i was curious about is are there communities that export goods in some sort of like is there a community that's like very well known for we create this one thing that we're actually selling to a lot of the other communities.

33:26Phillip Walton:Yeah, like even in a very small scale, the little electricity that is available, another town over, basically it's almost like the small export of Dukana. Like the fact that you can come here to store your vaccines and then take them over. The fact that you have to come here to print your stuff. There's some economics that are now playing out between these two communities because one has electricity. And now you can imagine a farmer, I mean, a businessman in Dukana saying, what if I could store some vegetables and I'm the guy who actually exports vegetables to Saru you can see already some some play of that so you know what's

34:06Erik Hersman:interesting about the north is that a lot of the ethnic groups up there hold their wealth in camels right like that you guys saw yeah right and it is one of the places in the world that has the most camels per capita right it is a lot of camels and very few people but do you remember how much a camel's worth a thousand dollars and yeah there we go a thousand dollars right and so you'd see herds of hundreds of camels right so they're asset rich cash poor yep and what that means is when when first of all when you want to build power up there you want to do something up there they can sell a camel to finance another business right they can do that so to buy a welding machine they can do it a lot of the communities that we go to they don't have that high value asset so when we're down in malawi in melange they they grow pineapples they grow tea uh they grow some vegetables right that's it they're not sitting on a lot a lot of wealth all the time so when you think about what do you do with the energy once you get it right um it really is determined by the community what they want to do by the entrepreneurs in the area.

35:17Erik Hersman:That's like everywhere in the world. It's the same, right? But I think the thing that the people from the north have going for them is they have an asset they can liquidate in the form of a camel, and they can finance their welding machine. They can finance a refrigerator, and they can make a business out of that, too.

35:37Phillip Walton:In Nairobi, I actually know a person who actually sells a lot of expensive... Actually, I know a guy who sells... His timing is amazing.

35:52Eric Yakes:Yeah.

35:52Phillip Walton:If you actually go to a Nairobi supermarket, you'll see these camel milk products that are super expensive, like 10x normal cow milk. And he's made a business out of that. So imagine if now I have refrigeration as there is a way to actually transport my camel milk and add value to it. And that would be an incredible partnership because his challenge is he doesn't have enough camel milk. There's a lot of people who want this camel milk product.

36:19Eric Yakes:It's super high value. Like it's really expensive. Yeah.

36:22Phillip Walton:And so I could see they have camels. And if you have refrigeration and so on, imagine a partnership where it's actually economically viable to take some of the milk from them and then take it to sell it to the bushy Nairobians. Yeah.

36:38Eric Yakes:And you just reminded me, we skipped an important cultural experience, which is having camel milk chai. I'm not too sad we missed that one.

36:48Mark Kamau:Oh, no.

36:48Erik Hersman:It's like smoky. He's still not sad he missed it. Yeah.

36:53Phillip Walton:I'm also not as a lactose intolerant guy.

36:57Mark Kamau:I mean, maybe the coolest cultural experience was Eric slaughtering the goat. You should tell the story.

37:05Eric Yakes:We were going to have a goat. We were going to split a goat with the Saru tribe elders for dinner. It was like a gesture of goodwill as well to wanting to work with them. And they brought a goat up, and I never slaughtered a goat. So he raised his hand. So I said, I'll take this one. And it's funny because Danny and I were talking about it. Danny's like, I couldn't do that. and i was just like well we're gonna eat it so oh i know the greater man slaughters the goat he looks the goat in the eyes i i know i was being hypocritical but that's like that's an up-closing day i don't know yeah it was uh but then the what was interesting is one of the elders he wanted to do like you know like the last cut because um it's halal it's halal he needed to technically a muslim needed to slaughter the goat or something but um it was a good goat you did the hard work I did yeah I did the heavy lifting it was a good goat I said to Danny Danny you have a good camera will you film him and Danny's like I don't even want to see that like doing that with the community is actually a very interesting thing because one we gave them cash we bought the goat yeah a market price so they actually they earn the you know the asset value they got paid the asset value but they don't go around slaughtering goats all the time they're not sitting there gorging themselves on meat.

38:24Eric Yakes:And so to have somebody else buy the goat and then invite you to enjoy the goat and not have to worry about eating as much as you want. It really is an incredible gesture in a community like that. And it's fun. It tastes good.

38:40Erik Hersman:So, you know, most of the time we focus on energy and Bitcoin mining. We're kind of simple. That's all we do. But it does, if you think about it, it does beg the question like what else could be done with bitcoin in these same places right if they already understand assets and and in the form of camels could they understand assets in the form of bitcoin and have more liquidity because it's actually pretty easy to sell one camel it's hard to sell 10 right um and you know there's you know often people ask us hey you know what do you guys do with the community for bitcoin we're like well we don't do very much our job we have a small team we mine Bitcoin.

39:18Erik Hersman:Our operations are that. But if anybody else wants to come in and be introduced to the community to learn about Bitcoin and do something with Bitcoin in that community, teach them about it, we'd be happy to do so. And we've done that up in Kenya in a number of places. But it makes me think, when you look at that Saru community, could you see a path to them, maybe first of all, paying for their electricity tokens with lightning? And then if they're using it for one thing, could they use it for another?

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42:15Mark Kamau:Yeah, yeah. But that's the largest slum in Nairobi, right? Yes. And so we went there with me, Mark, Mitch from Afrobit. We looked at that community. They have maybe the best circular economy I've seen. I think there was something like 56 different merchants. 65. 65 merchants that were accepting Bitcoin. Bitcoin. And one of the cool things is like the problem with that I've seen with these like circular Bitcoin economies is how does the Bitcoin get there in the first place? And then we were speaking to the guy who owns the trash collection business and he's getting paid in Bitcoin and then paying his 25 employees in Bitcoin.

42:49Mark Kamau:So it's like naturally getting into this like circular economy. And you were saying that when you went to set up the Starlink out there, you were also quite skeptical of this. And then you saw someone buying oranges in Bitcoin.

43:00Phillip Walton:Yeah, it wasn't a setup because sometimes you're walking with somebody who's showing you their community and they probably have told somebody over there, oh, could you stay there? We're bringing someone to talk to you. And so while we're talking to somebody here, I'm looking at all these QR codes for Blink. And I'm seeing somebody actually scanning and another person scanning, taking a couple of oranges. And I'm like, wow, this is pretty cool. That it's the average person. It's not like a tech savvy guy. It's the average mom buying oranges for her kids. And they're scanning a Bitcoin QR code.

43:36Mark Kamau:Yeah, because that was the question I kept asking Mitch. I was like, is this just like you and your like smaller Bitcoin community using this or is it everyone? Like I was like, this guy on the street, is he going to be using Bitcoin? Mitch was like, yeah. And the thing that like to get back to Saru, the thing that I think made me realize is people will find a way to pay for it. Like if you're offering, you know, electricity and the only option they have is paying sats, they're going to figure out how to do it. And then what's the benefit to them of doing that?

44:01Eric Yakes:And we're going to inject. I mean, this is the other thing. is like this is Bitcoin, this global marketplace that's injecting capital into that community. Because we're gonna use the Bitcoin we earn to pay the salaries. We could pay those salaries in Bitcoin. So that's now injecting real capital into that community.

44:22Phillip Walton:And there is actually another dynamic I saw, which I actually saw a use case for Bitcoin. You saw they're drinking beer that's not from Kenya. The beer is from Ethiopia. Because it's cheaper. Yeah. Yeah. And even there's friction in currency between the Kenyan consumer and an Ethiopian trader. The darker camels, they actually buy those from Ethiopia. And so if you think about the currency situation between Kenya and Ethiopia, there's friction there. And if you imagine that, in fact, is another way that Bitcoin could actually help in cross-border trading. between Kenyans and Ethiopians.

45:03Eric Yakes:Yeah. So one of the interesting things that, like, when I see this type of adoption happening, and if we think about how money worked historically, and then when we think about how, you know, when people were adopting money naturally in private markets, it had certain properties that made it good money. And one of those properties is just like a wide acceptability. And that's something that's actually used today often is just like a criticism of Bitcoin. It's like, oh, it's typically goods that were used in primitive societies like cattle, like salt. They were things that were naturally held by most people.

45:41Eric Yakes:Everybody wanted to have cattle naturally. And then it's natural that it can become a form of money because there's always a constant demand for it. And when we think about that with Bitcoin, it's like, okay, so how are we going to naturally get Bitcoin in the hands of a bunch of people? And I think that when we think about how will these communities grow over time when they realize that the rest of the world is connected to the grid, has some floor clearing price that they're always able to sell back onto the grid with. And now Bitcoin's just that, for the world that's not connected to the grid.

46:15Eric Yakes:So that has major implications. And I think it could be something that becomes incredibly foundational to any sort of off-grid form of energy investment. And when we think about that, it's like, okay, so if you're a community and this becomes just like a basic utility function for any sort of off-grid economy, then you're naturally going to start trying to economize around that. And I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see communities, you know, do something similar, do something natively where they're actually getting more interested in mining the Bitcoin themselves. Like, okay, well, you know, if we have our own capacity and like, Eric, you're doing a great job.

46:51Erik Hersman:You got some space on the racks for me?

46:52Eric Yakes:Yeah, you got some space on the racks for me. Exactly. And I wouldn't be surprised if you start to see that as they grow over time. And it's like, that's actually a really interesting thing, too. And then maybe there's like little, you know, mini forms of exchange that are happening between communities because of that. But like that's something where I can see it's like if you want like bottom up Bitcoin adoption and you want to have like a natural reason that makes it widely accepted for the monetary use case. Like this is definitely the most natural incentive aligned function I think I've really seen that would create that outcome.

47:22Erik Hersman:You know, I think so, too. I mean, there's something really interesting about energy is this base layer for human progress. Right. This is this is the story of human progress is the story of energy. OK. And so you see that when you come into a really raw situation like what we've seen over the last week. Right. So when you walk into a place that has nothing, it's very different. Very different. Right. You drop in your energy, but you're also having to drop in what? Distribution. Somebody has to drop in distribution. The interesting thing about being in that position of power, not energy power, but power, is that you can say, the way this is paid for is this.

48:01Erik Hersman:Use these meters that pay in this type of way. So lightning, M-PESA, something like that. And we get our, and that can kickstart the acceptance the acceptance of Bitcoin in the community, they don't actually have to care about all of the things that we think are interesting about Bitcoin. All they have to care about is, oh, this is how I get cheap electricity. That's the only thing that matters. And from there, from that one seed that gets planted are a number of other routes. It can go towards the route of value aggregation. It can go towards the route of, oh, I could use this for cross-border trade.

48:39Erik Hersman:or there's a lot of ways it can grow from there. So having a base layer need met with a requirement of paying it with Bitcoin could be really interesting.

48:49Eric Yakes:Yeah, but I actually like Eric's idea because I don't know that I had necessarily thought about it, which is, do we get the community to sell five camels and buy 10 miners? And that money comes into a community fund. Right, because that's right. Yeah, into the school bursary. That's a perfect example or to fund the health clinic. Because the thing is, like, we're at this huge advantage that we have the economic justification to build this energy source. We have the economic justification to build the infrastructure around it. But it's then up to us to get creative about how we monetize it. And we can monetize it ourselves or we can sell them, you know, cheap inside the four walls energy for them to mine Bitcoin.

49:37Mark Kamau:And that could almost be like table money.

49:39Eric Yakes:Yeah, exactly.

49:40Phillip Walton:And it's also, I saw a use case as well that is quite interesting. You have situations where there's long periods of drought. So I was with Andrew in the car and he was showing me skeletons of camels that died. And he said to me two years ago, even camels couldn't survive. And so imagine a situation like that where you're like, okay, right now it's not the right time to keep this camel. I'm going to sell mine to Ethiopia, keep the money in Bitcoin. And then when we have the conditions again, and maybe that's the time for mining where you're like, it's too much solar for even camels, but it's excellent for mining.

50:19Phillip Walton:So if I have miners, I actually could continue mining. And when the conditions are better, I have a lot more liquidity to actually purchase. Oh, man, that's a great idea.

50:27Eric Yakes:Like transfer your camels into miners during droughts because they're going to die anyway. and then extract them back out. But so, I mean, we had a bunch of interesting experiences along the way, but coming into Saru with the piles of white bones, it was a bit unsettling. And I finally asked Andrew and he's like, yeah, during this drought, like some people came and said they would buy these bones from us. So if we would bleach them in the sun, they would come by the bones for us. And so I guess they went around and collected up a bunch of bones and then the guys reneged and didn't buy them. But it did look a bit sketchy.

51:09Mark Kamau:But obviously, of all the places we saw, there's massive opportunity in, we probably saw 10 villages that could have had the same thing. What's the big restraint from doing this? Is it just capital?

51:19Erik Hersman:It's now just capital, right? So before, so the massive expansion in solar and battery storage has already started, right? And it's one of these things that if you just look at the data, you can see it clearly, globally, it's going like this, right? And Africa is no different. And what's happened, though, is that with the U.S. tariffs on China, the Chinese are looking to deploy them faster in other parts of the world, right? Like Africa. So the pricing is really good. And, you know, the expansion can be massive. So, like, what we figured out is that for a million dollars, you can put up a megawatt of solar array, 5 ,000 megawatt hours of battery storage, and...

52:12Erik Hersman:Five megawatt hours. Sorry. See, let me do this again. $4 million. You can put down one megawatt solar array. You can put five megawatt hours of battery storage, all the miners for 250 kilowatts and the containers for them for that$1 million. And that's a profitable deployment that's making money from day one. So that's by itself without selling any energy to the community. So if that's true, the new model for rapidly electrifying the continent is going to say, oh, where can we drop in one megawatt to 10 megawatt size sites? It's just capital. We get good returns. Phil, what was the IRR on that?

52:54Erik Hersman:Oh, it's like almost 30%. So 30 % IRR.

52:58Eric Yakes:Like it's kind of ridiculous. And that's just Bitcoin mining. So the crazy thing is that's the baseline just doing Bitcoin mining. If you sell to the community, it'll be even better. It's premium. Yeah.

53:07Erik Hersman:So there's always the problem with, okay, we've unlocked a new model. is saying, okay, well, let's go get this started and tested. And then people get confidence that you can, okay, I can put my money here and I will get my money back out. Africa is always one of those places that has a risk premium attached to it, for good reason, in certain parts. And so you need to be able to go out there and prove and show this. So that's what we're doing now. It's like, hey, let's go build one or two of these sites, quickly deploy it, quickly show that it can make money. And then let's turn the gas on this thing.

53:39Erik Hersman:You know and let's build you know 15 of these every year in multiple communities Like there's no there's no stopping it and open the model so that everybody else can do it, too

53:49Mark Kamau:Yeah, cuz then that's one of the interesting things is like with the cut to USAID Like all of these solar panels like they're out there in these communities are basically NGO work And so that if with that being cut it now needs to be industries like you doing well

54:01Erik Hersman:And I won't get into that too much besides saying thank God USAID was deleted Because they bastardized the whole economy Yeah, because all these NGOs are propped up. So you didn't get a real market Somebody who's looking at this as a real market and saying I'm gonna come in there with a business and solve this problem You got NGOs with concessionary financing coming in building a site 20 kilowatt site the wind flips over the The the solar panels and they don't flip them back over for three to six months and then their battery storage that they put on them It dies in the first year. They never fix or replace them So we saw that in Saru.

54:41Eric Yakes:They had the solar right up front. They're just like, oh, yeah, it's this perfectly good set of solar panels, but there's just like some sort of infrastructure that was off to the side of it that they needed that was broken. Like it's been...

54:50Mark Kamau:That was for the well. So there was like three solar panels above a well. Yeah, right. And the well had never worked because they never plumbed it in. So it's there. They never plumbed it in. That's what it was. All they needed was like three pipes and the thing worked. Yeah, like just never got finished.

55:02Eric Yakes:All this money invested in that. Three pipes are missing.

55:05Erik Hersman:This is like, this is so much, so many of the NGOs that work in Africa are, are, are, you know, they have about a 10 % success rate, right? And they keep getting money. No business would keep getting money if you, if you fail 90 % of the time. Right. So having a market-based approach to solving a basic necessity, like energy profitably from day one means that it's good for everybody. So when I first went in and I ambushed those elders the first time, um, and I, and I showed up at the I said, hey, I want to talk to people about electricity. And I sat down with them. We spent probably two hours together.

55:38Erik Hersman:And I said, I am not an NGO. I'm not going to give you anything for free. I'm going to invest a bunch of money into building this energy. And we're going to make that profitable. You are going to figure out how to do the distribution. You need to put your own money into that. You need to have your people who want to be members of this co-op sell camels.

55:58Mark Kamau:So but how do they receive that? Because these towns out there, everything they've ever had in terms of this is like NGO money that comes in and it is giving them for something for free. Even if it like distorts the economy, it doesn't work. You end up paying 75 cents for your kilowatt hour of your energy. Like how do they receive that when you're saying you're going to have to put a hundred.

56:16Erik Hersman:Well, they're also used to business though. These guys, uh, you know, in, in the world of, of, again, we keep going back to camels, but it makes sense there. Like everybody who's like, why do they keep talking about camels? Because camels are everything. That is your wealth, right? So, um, I mean, the, the business of camels is a business. They're used to business too. The guy who runs a little dukkah over there, a little shop is a business, right? The guy who sells diesel is, you know, out of jerry cans is a business. So they know business. Now they're used to white people coming in and giving them handouts.

56:44Erik Hersman:And, you know, so the, the, the reset that they need to have, which is, I was very, very, um, direct on the conversation was like, Hey, we are not an NGO. Nobody, nobody's bringing charity money here. that's gone that's not happening right we are a business we need to be profitable and you need to think about this as a way that helps your community yes but also is run profitably by you if you're going to do a co-op right and uh they sat there for a while we went back and forth 30 minutes on this asked me a bunch of questions and i was like and they're like oh well how how much would we have to spend to to buy a transformer it's like well you know it costs you like 15 000 let's say it's I was like, okay, that's like 15 camels.

57:26Erik Hersman:Like, yeah. It's like, and how about for the poles and the cables? And I was like, okay. So they sat there for a while, they talked amongst themselves and they came back and said, what if we just started by putting the grid in the business area where we were sitting, right? And then the other people could get power later. I was like, that's up to you, right? That's up to you. But you need to make the decision on what that needs to be. And there's no reason why you couldn't have like a mobile swapping station for batteries where people who lived in, and these are mostly nomadic people. So people who live three four kilometers away could just bring a battery in and then take it back to the house And they're like we could do that.

58:01Erik Hersman:I was like, yes, you can do this right? This is the kind of thing and you need to charge for it And so we finally we don't I think we we have crossed the Chasm in the conversation about no, this is not a charity. Yeah, this is something that needs to work It needs to work for you as well, and you need to have a stake in it

58:18Eric Yakes:It's funny when sorry you got and then I was gonna say this illustrates some of the things we were talking about yesterday with Mark and Femi, which is, and I think in this broader context, you know, what Eric's describing is, we're gonna bring this electricity and you guys are gonna figure out how to make money with it, because that, it's your nature. Like you want to figure out how to use this new tool, this new technology for productivity. But when you talk to, you know, Eric and I went and met with, I want to say the name, but like some people that have been funding energy projects to limited success, if you will, you know, they're spending all their effort thinking about like, how do we create things that will use electricity?

59:00Eric Yakes:It's like they want to force the consumption of electricity with their little gadgets instead of simply making the electricity available and seeing, you know, how do the communities ultimately use that?

59:12Erik Hersman:Yeah, so like people like, you know, like we're used to the free market, right? And we say the free market, Like people will figure out for themselves what businesses they need to build how they make money right? NGOs come from this perspective of We need to help you figure out how you can make money.

59:29Eric Yakes:We need to tell you How you need to make money.

59:32Mark Kamau:Yeah, it was funny when we were like on the drive into sorrow Eric was like giving us all the rundown of what you wanted people to do because Philip was gonna go do a site survey. He was like will you guys go and speak to the community? I was it was like yeah cool interview and see what they want to use energy for like it will they build businesses? And he's like maybe just start in the business district you kind of sold that wrong this was not a business district

59:53Erik Hersman:well yeah okay when you get when when we show the videos or or a picture of it yeah it'll you'll be like okay maybe district might be a strong word but the interesting thing was the things that

1:00:05Mark Kamau:they wanted was like obviously lights for refrigeration they wanted to watch the premier

1:00:10Eric Yakes:league everywhere in africa premier league tv is number three on the list so it's light actually it's probably phone light tv yeah yeah yeah and we're already seeing you already saw

1:00:23Phillip Walton:people actually using the little power that they have for business because when i saw people with a smartphone we were asking them how do you charge your smartphone yeah and they say oh there's a guy over there with a shop we actually pay him 20 shillings for one charge yeah so already there's already anecdotes of power being used for business and so if you actually expand that capacity then the question is how in what different ways will they monetize it for themselves and they'll

1:00:51Mark Kamau:figure it out themselves yeah and they're doing the same thing in the school i think they'd go to the school charge a phone and pay 20 bob or whatever um and the other like missing piece in this is internet access because like they have cell signal there um but they're using like small bits of data between using their phone they're turning data on and off like you could do basically what you're doing with Feddy at the moment, Mark, where you can put a Starlink up there, start charging sats for unlimited internet access.

1:01:18Phillip Walton:Yes, that actually would be a very easy sell. To actually set up a Starlink there if you have power and put connectivity there. And it's actually another way that Bitcoin actually gets into the community because they would pay with sats. And that'd be cool. The other thing that Eric actually pushed on with the community, which was interesting, is institutional customers for the energy. we already asked the school which only lit half of the dorms because they have like a bunch of classrooms but they have solar that is enough to light only four or something like i think there's only two only two yeah only two of them they could light and then eric and you were asking if there was power would you light the entire school they say yes and then we're like yeah but who would pay for it and he says i get a budget every quarter and i determine how to spend that budget, budget from the government and the Ministry of Education.

1:02:11Phillip Walton:And they're like, oh, we would be a customer because I would actually choose to light so that people can study and so on. So I feel like even after Bitcoin mining, which is profitable, you already are seeing that's like a solid customer who would consistently buy power. And so, yeah, I mean, actually, I'm very excited. I hope we get to do this.

1:02:33Erik Hersman:okay i gotta i gotta i want a question for you guys okay so yeah you've been to africa before you've been to egypt yeah which is considered africa when it's like you know trying to go to the world cup for the olympics but the rest of the time it's not um so what are your thoughts now because you you you know you had already you know invested in gridless yeah and you had never really seen kind of what this situation looked like yeah yeah okay so i'm gonna talk i'll tie this all into a broader point um gridless what you guys are doing i think

1:03:11Eric Yakes:my primary takeaway is that to build out this thesis of stranded energy in africa like you guys are like the only people that can do that like that's that's the number one thing that i realized doing all of this. And I think that the broader point, when I think about what's happening with Bitcoin mining, we take a step back and it's like, okay, so we have hash rate growing at this exponential rate. And with that trend happening, the question is, well, the break even cost of mining is something that is, the energy cost is lowering and lowering every year. You have to get more and more efficient with the type of energy that you're using.

1:03:55Eric Yakes:And at some point in the future, there's only certain types of energy that are even going to be economically viable because Bitcoin mining is going to be so competitive. So it's like, well, where does that energy exist? And it's in these off-grid stranded areas where you get the most economically viable energy in the world. So when I think about the future of mining and I think about like, well, if we're trying to skate to the puck, where is it going? It's going to the stranded market. There's going to be a future where the only economic form of doing this is in these types of markets. And then the question is like, okay, so now let's think about that within a competitive environment.

1:04:31Eric Yakes:And within a competitive environment, we're going to see the economics approach the closest cost to what is the capital cost to deploy an energy project? And what's my payback period on that? and ultimately even within the stranded market I think the areas where you can maintain as much of a premium over that payback period on the capital cost of deploy energy those are gonna be the markets that are most advantageous and those are also the markets that are the hardest to access because those are gonna be those need and have the most need those are gonna be the least competitive markets so it's when I think about Africa is like for energy assets I think about it as a moat.

1:05:14Eric Yakes:The question is, are you somebody who's behind the moat or not? And that's what I think about Gridless is you guys are behind the moat. You guys have grown up in this place. You obviously know everything about it. You know, we've slaughtered a goat together. And it's like, okay, cool. So, like, there's very, very, very few people in the world, I think, capable of attacking an opportunity like this. And I think that, like, that's kind of my key takeaway from the trip is, like, that was awesome. You guys are absolute experts. Nobody else in the world is doing this. And there's a massive opportunity here.

1:05:48Eric Yakes:And the way that it's going to be unlocking and enabling value and economics from Bitcoin, from energy, from other things, I view it as just like, if you guys can build like a very large energy footprint in this market, I think there's going to be a future in the next five to 10 years where everyone's going to be like, okay, well, where are the best places to go mine energy? Where are those assets existing? Oh shit, Gridless owns a lot of them. Yeah, and and I think there's gonna be a lot of value placed on that.

1:06:15Mark Kamau:Yeah There's no way anyone else is coming to this market and doing the things that you're doing like me and Eric were joking the other day Like we'd have died on the first day of that trip

1:06:21Eric Yakes:Yeah, like the first set of spikes across the road

1:06:25Mark Kamau:but like for me the Obviously I came to Africa a couple years ago We went to Malawi and that was honestly one of the most pivotal things I've ever seen in Bitcoin I've said I've told this story a number of times on the podcast But it was when we were at dinner on like one of the last nights and we were in that field It was all lit by lanterns. We're having like a nice meal, but everything was pitch black everywhere. And I remember sitting at that meal, it must have been like 11 o 'clock, looking around and looking at Mount Melange and there were lights there. And the whole place was darkness, but there were lights there.

1:06:56Mark Kamau:And I was like, holy shit, that's what Bitcoin did. Like that is what Bitcoin enables. And like seeing this trip, Saru, obviously very, very different to Malawi in terms of like how the place looks. The vegetation. The vegetation, yeah. Yeah, water. But like thinking that the only way that this makes economic sense to go and build these sites there is because of Bitcoin and the downstream consequence of that is, you know, it's electrifying Africa. Like it's still blows my mind.

1:07:25Erik Hersman:Yeah, like that. Yeah, the downstream effect is just good things happen. Yeah.

1:07:30Mark Kamau:And it's like, why is this magic internet money doing this? And it still trips me out to this day. Yeah. Yeah.

1:07:36Erik Hersman:So, okay. So, you know, both have some good takeaways from this. If you were to tell somebody else to come to Africa to see things, we covered a lot of things in four days. What do you think is the thing that you would say, yeah, this is what you need to see? Now, not many people will get to Saru. You know how hard that is, right? But, you know, what do you think is interesting, especially for Bitcoiners, right? Like, I mean, that's who listens to this podcast, Right, so if you're gonna come to Africa, you've been to a couple places. You've been a few places now What do you think is interesting?

1:08:09Erik Hersman:What do you think actually matters? Is it is it after bit and Kibera the circular economy?

1:08:14Mark Kamau:That kind of thing so I think both after bit the circular economy and Tando is Makes can you maybe the best place in the world explain Tando So Tando is like this very basic app. It's not the prettiest app in the world But it works insanely well so you can essentially pay for any good or service in Kenya with Bitcoin using Tando You have to explain why the reason it works. Yeah, so the reason it works is because Kenya's economy basically runs on M-Pesa Which is mobile money and so they found a way of integrating Bitcoin into that So you pay an M-Pesa bill with a lightning invoice and there's a swap in the background And you can you can live on Bitcoin in Kenya maybe better than anywhere in the world In fact almost certainly I can't think of anywhere even close

1:08:55Eric Yakes:Well, no because like it's essentially a hundred percent of the businesses in Kenya can take Bitcoin via Tanda.

1:09:02Mark Kamau:Yeah

1:09:03Eric Yakes:And the reason is, you know, M-PESA is completely ubiquitous. I mean, we never carry cash. We just all carry our phone. And you just send shillings, like P2P. You pay at the till. You can send money to businesses. And the fact that Tondo allows you to just basically take your sats and send it P2P, send it to the till, send it to the merchant, it's absolutely incredible.

1:09:28Mark Kamau:And then with Minmo on the other side of that, so Tondo is only an off-ramp. And then MIMO is basically the opposite. It's the reverse where you can turn M-Pesa into Bitcoin. And so if you want to live 100 % on Bitcoin, you should probably live in Nairobi.

1:09:42Phillip Walton:Just for context for people, I was looking this up. Last year,$300 billion was transacted on M-Pesa.

1:09:51Eric Yakes:Holy shit. Wow. That's a big market.

1:09:54Phillip Walton:Yeah, it's close to 70 % of our GDP.

1:09:57Eric Yakes:Yeah.

1:09:57Phillip Walton:It's on this mobile money.

1:09:58Eric Yakes:And I didn't even think about it until just this minute. I actually bought the goat with Bitcoin. Because Eric's like, hey, can you send this guy the money for the goat? And I literally just went on Tondo. And I sent it to myself first before I P2P'd it to him. But I mean, I effectively bought that goat with Bitcoin. I didn't even think about it. Like it was just...

1:10:19Mark Kamau:Insaru, that's crazy. I wonder if that's the first goat purchase in Bitcoin. I don't know. Maybe anymore. The first live goat purchase. Maybe. But as Bitcoiners who live in Nairobi, how much are you using Bitcoin? Are you using it for almost all transactions? It just kind of flows with a lot of transactions.

1:10:42Erik Hersman:I don't know how many that is, but I know I'm one of the larger volume users of Tondo. I've asked them. So I use it quite a bit. What's interesting about Nairobi in the Bitcoin community too is that it's actually fairly active. We have a monthly meetup at Waitabit, which is a little coffee shop. It's a great coffee shop. 30 to 40 people there every time. And amongst them, you're going to find Bitcoin engineers, Lightning engineers. There's usually five or six different people who represent companies building tech there on Bitcoin for Bitcoin. Yeah, right and and and then other people who are like there's three or four guys who are doing circular economy things in and around Nairobi So it's actually a really active good community in Nairobi for Bitcoin

1:11:31Mark Kamau:Yeah, one of my other big takeaways I think probably from the last year but then especially this trip is that the Bitcoin tools and services that people use in all these different countries in Africa Need to be built by people in those communities because there's it you can't just like port Phoenix wallet which I think is great and I use all the time, but you can't just port that to Kibera for a number of reasons. Like you have to fund lightning channels. And then the big, yeah, that's the thing that I never knew until this trip. Mark, you were telling me about this, is that if you have a Bitcoin app that's, you know, a couple hundred megabytes, no one's downloading it there.

1:12:05Mark Kamau:There's like a very hard ceiling on what people are willing to spend data on.

1:12:09Phillip Walton:Even that, that's actually, that's what I find in my UX research work. Think about it with all the utility of M-Pesa. It's the most used tool, but only 5 % of people download the M-Pesa because it's heavy.

1:12:24Mark Kamau:Crazy.

1:12:25Phillip Walton:Even with its huge advantages, you cannot exist economically in Kenya without M-Pesa, and even that they don't download. So how much worse is your app going to get in terms of acceptance and downloads if it's big? If it's beyond 16 MB, forget it 60 megabytes 16 16 16 yes damn actually I would have said eight I would have said eight and it's even lower because while Africa has the highest growth of smartphones getting here they're low capacity smartphone yeah made in China with low capacity and so somebody has to make a decision am I going to keep my family photos or my baby's photos or your app, guess who's going to lose?

1:13:14Phillip Walton:And for Bitcoin, when you're talking about using Tando, some of us who got into Bitcoin late, we actually trying to keep as much Bitcoin as possible. So I'm actually using Minmumor.

1:13:27Mark Kamau:But so in Kibera, it seemed like everyone was just using BlinkWallet. Is that because of the size of the actual app?

1:13:35Phillip Walton:So it speaks to what you're talking about and it speaks to the work I do like human-centered design and UX with the communities. Blink has done two things. Number one, it's very easy. The experience is simple. The KYC is simple. The onboarding is simple. So all these things work for Blink and it's small. That's number one. And then Blink has made a point of having community engagement days. So Blink has certain features that have been built into Blink purely because of the use cases in Kibera. So they're responding to feedback and they're engaging with the community. What other people are doing is building one wallet and they hope that it will work homogeneously across different use cases.

1:14:19Phillip Walton:And the way money works in Kibera, as you saw, is different from the typical use case in the US. And so then there's There is a fundamental dissonance between use cases while it's a billed full versus the realities of how money moves in Africa. And I think that gap is why building specific use cases for Africa is important.

1:14:43Mark Kamau:Yeah, and I think, yeah, that's super interesting because really these people aren't Bitcoiners necessarily. No. So they don't need to like understand how to fund lightning channels and things like this. No. It just needs to be a very simple app that works.

1:14:56Phillip Walton:Yeah, and that's why I think a successful Bitcoin wallet for Bitcoin to succeed, human experiences need to take a forefront and they take a backseat. Today, the technology on chain, like all this is what is at the forefront. The human experience is hardly mentioned. And I think it's time to flip a switch because people look at this as, I'm only using it because it's an amazing tool that enables me to do what I need to do. The fact that it's Blink or any other wallet is irrelevant.

1:15:31Mark Kamau:It really is. But this is why I have a lot of faith that if you do this in Saru, people will just find a way of doing it. If they have to pay in Bitcoin, they'll figure that out.

1:15:40Erik Hersman:There's a quote by Clay Shirky, which is, communications technology only becomes socially interesting when it becomes technologically boring, right? And, you know, we think that Bitcoin mining needs to be this boring enabler for businesses. We think that the Bitcoin wallets need to be boring things that, of course, you have it and you use it, but you don't talk about it because it's boring. Like, it's like email. Nobody talks about email, but it's the thing that's probably used the most by everybody in the world for just day-to-day kind of communications activity, right? So the same thing in Bitcoin, whether you're building apps or services for people to use Bitcoin or whether you're doing things on the mining and the Bitcoin network layer, like make it something that's useful and boring and you'll get a lot of adoption.

1:16:29Mark Kamau:Make Bitcoin boring.

1:16:31Erik Hersman:This is, we've done our best for the last hour.

1:16:36Mark Kamau:So this is, we've got, But it's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. That's been the quote of the trip. Every time everything went wrong, it's fine.

1:16:46Erik Hersman:When you got slapped in the face by another wave, it's fine. Everything's fine.

1:16:49Eric Yakes:That's the title of the episode. Everything's fine. Everything's fine.

1:16:52Phillip Walton:I really hope you put all these visual references. When he talks about slap on the wave, when he talks about fish almost caught, Eric has got video of this. So I think the visuals on this would be amazing.

1:17:03Mark Kamau:Ben, who edits this video, is going to absolutely hate this one. But we'll make sure it's all included. But we, I mean, our time's up. We've got to go to the airport. The Africa trip is over. Thank you. A huge, huge thank you. This is something that there's no way on earth I would ever have done this trip in my lifetime if you guys didn't put this on for us. So I appreciate it massively. Where's the next adventure?

1:17:24Erik Hersman:Thank you guys for being good sports. Yeah, thanks for putting up with all the craziness of Africa and the lack of timeliness on things. So it happens. You guys rolled with it.

1:17:34Mark Kamau:Before we did the trip, we got an email from Eric. I'm not going to lie, it made me a little bit nervous. It was like, because we got things go wrong in Africa. Yeah, we're going to have airy back insurance for you. Yeah, yeah. But everything was fine. Everything was fine. Everything was fine.

1:17:50Eric Yakes:And the truth is, we would never do that for ourselves. It was just because you guys were coming, we were like, all right, we should probably do the right thing. Right, right, right.

1:17:57Phillip Walton:And in Africa, you learned, you got the watch, we got the time.

1:18:00Mark Kamau:Yeah, exactly. That was one of my quotes of the trick. I love that. So when we come back in a couple of years time, what's the next thing?

1:18:07Erik Hersman:There is more adventures across Africa that can be done and more adventures in energy, specifically in Africa. And those energy adventures will always be led by Bitcoin. I was talking to one of these concessionary funders in Europe and we didn't care about them because we'll never take money from them. I said, in five years time, you will not fund an energy project that doesn't have Bitcoin money attached to it because it won't make financial sense. I love that.

1:18:33Mark Kamau:I want you to plan the next trip. Philip's too out there. I'm scared of going on a trip. He's like, let's go to Saddam.

1:18:44Erik Hersman:With current genocide. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:18:47Mark Kamau:But this has been awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys, man.

1:18:51Eric Yakes:It really was a fun trip.

1:18:53Mark Kamau:Africa's done, man.

1:18:54Eric Yakes:It was amazing. We did it. Off to Abu Dhabi. Let's go. All right.

1:19:13Thank you.