The Real Bitcoin Revolution Is Grassroots | Rod Roudi

29:13So at the pleb or grassroots level, it's happening with a guy like scott open sourcing the bitaxe project so you can build your own home miner and just with whatever one two three terahash just mine bitcoin at home without your own electricity you're the probability of you hitting a block is zero basically but you know what happens well have two blocks been found by a bitaxe or more in the last year maybe. Exactly. So it can happen. And you know what? If enough crazy people get involved or get a future bit or just this is the best way to learn about Bitcoin, in my opinion, is just to mine Bitcoin.

29:50You're running a full node. You're learning about Bitcoin. You're learning about deposit addresses. You're learning about mining pools. You're learning about everything. And you're just like, wait, how does this work? Wait, why is there a firmware? Wait, why is there a firmware that I can't really adjust? Or what does it, how does this make sense? And so you got folks like the scots of the world i mean this ember one that we're working on is going to be badass and there's so many other things i mean just the the density i've missed this so well it's it's one of the 256 foundation projects it's like the next evolution in the in the bidax um world um i mean there's a number of other bid axes as well which is just uh freaking awesome um you got to bring eco on uh yeah i don't want to yeah because he should go into each of the projects and really tell you the story because going to that, like the state of the Bitcoin mining industry still continues to be very centralized.

30:49However, you got a guy like Jack Dorsey, and I got to give Jack a lot of credit here. You know, as a CEO of a now Fortune 500 company, for him to be like, you know what, Thomas Templeton and team, Max Guys, Genia, uh, Perry. I mean, the list goes on with that entire proto team. I'm going to give you the air coverage. I'm going to give you the funding and let's go and see if we can't build a better Bitcoin miner. And by the way, let's not go and make it the same form factor. Let's reinvent what this could be. And so they were kind enough, by the way, to invite me out to their launch event. And so I got to talk with the team.

31:25I got to go actually see the product live. I got to like lift it. I got to do all of it with Scott and Nico. And one of the things that struck me was like over this one, two year period of time in development, they're like, look, we went out to the field. We went out to the field and talked to miners on what they cared about. They're like, dude, we have to scrap almost an entire miner because the hashboard is just kaput, or the fan just breaks or whatever. And so it was like, well, what if it wasn't, what if you could just replace the fan easily, just like take it out, pop it back in. That's the thing that resonated with me so much because I've been out to see Gridless' site in Kenya and I've seen a couple of them.

32:09And the big issue they have there is like the fans just get full of bugs and flies and that grows. Like the ability just to like rip that out and replace it is a game changer for them. And here's the other cool thing, not to just, you know, boost, boost them up. Um, they went out and talk to it. Like for me, I'd be too enterprising. I'd be like, okay, who are our customers? Who are our biggest customers? Oh, the enterprise customer, like clean spark, you know, riot, uh, the irons of the world. fire into the world. Let's just go talk to them. No, they brought some of those folks, but they brought like my boys from Cholla who are the West Texas miners.

32:48They brought the Wilson mining brothers, you know, that are out in, you know, the sticks in Iowa. They brought out all of these folks and then they brought like knuckleheads like us that are the home miners that have nothing to do like with their world. But they're like, we want you guys to battle test this. We want you to question this. We want you to question the firmware, the, the, the, the fleet management software that we've developed. And it was just so dang cool. So it was cool to see at the scale that they were building it out. It was cool to see the support for the grassroots Bitcoin home mining community across the board.

33:21I mean, Jack was there. He was giddy about like just seeing it live. I mean, you could tell, and you've been around him enough and his team, like when he sees it live, I could just feel how proud he was of the team that they're at this moment in time. And this is just a milestone, man. Everyone's like, oh, it's only 14 joules per tera hash, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, by the way, Bitmain announced, I think it was like nine joules per tera hash, but that's in 2026. They haven't shipped it. Okay, that's one. Two, how often do those come off even the rack and they're busted? Okay, how often are they, you know, DOA after three to six months?

34:00What's the cost of the downtime and the replacement cost? So what's your all in cost, your investment in that, or you get one that's basically super durable or more durable and it's more easily replaceable. So, you know, instead of a 90 % uptime or your CapEx needing to buy, I don't know, I don't, I have no idea if this is the right strategy, but do you buy 10 to 20 % over your already allotment because you need to have those miners, you know, on the shelf because you have 5 % always every month that go down for fix. And you need to just be running. So you're ripping and replacing all the time.

34:39So I think bringing on Eco, because he can even be more full-throated than I am about this space. You know me, I'm build the bridge. I'm glass half full. I couldn't be more bullish on where we're going on all the fronts in Bitcoin. Just the people that are working in this space, even the haters. I mean, And like even these freaking shell treasury companies bring it like everybody across the board. You know, Bitcoin is anti-fragile. And the more and more people that have eyes on it, that attack it, that build on it, it benefits Bitcoin. It just it truly does, in my opinion. I think one of the cool things as well is I've not seen this this minor or anything, but I've heard that there's like an AI agent on board that will tell you that like parts are going to be retired.

35:28in, say, three months, the fan's wearing out, whatever it might be. And that integration of AI into these machines seems really cool, especially in terms of downtime. You can have the replacements ready to go, rip something out, put it in, and there's really no downtime. I know you guys have been doing a lot of AI stuff in Austin. What's going on there? So, yeah, no, I mean, on the park side, we incorporate AI as much as we can in terms of our operations and our workflow. we've been hosting at the Austin meetup, Tony and Justin, whenever they're in town or when they've been in town, they've been hosting a weekly or biweekly AI meetup.

36:11And I want to do more of that, to be honest with you, Danny, because I do think there's a convergence happening between Bitcoin, AI, energy. And I want to always make sure that there's a conversation happening within open source freedom tech, because, you know, and I'm guilty of this as well. I'll like, I like to experiment with all of the AI tools from even chat GPT to, you know, Claude and so on. And a lot of them are closed source. And I'm still learning what are the trade-offs in using these tools, right? Versus an open source LLM and the tools around that. So always having that kind of a lens of, and by the way, every single week, it feels like there's something new or something being launched.

36:55And I'm just like blown away by the productivity improvements, by what I, my, my simpleton brain can even imagine what are the possibilities. I'm such the left side of the bell curve where I'm like, oh, well, this is our static process. And I'm like, okay, blow that whole thing up. And now what if we just concentrated on building? Like, let me give marty a huge shout out dude have you seen his videos that he's been producing yeah they're incredible they're really cool and and and um opportunity cost is a very cool app that he's just completely vibe coded vibe coded he got a small team together he had an idea and he shipped it i mean how cool is that and that's why uh and i haven't read this post by alan Farrington, he just emailed me something along like P doom equals zero, which I assume means like, you know, like stop being a doomer.

37:48It's not happening. Like be an optimist. Dude, the stuff that we're going to build with having Bitcoin as the as the monetary network in the apps, the applications and the tooling that we create is going to be fundamentally so freaking amazing. And I do think it converges back onto Bitcoin. And then I think it converges back onto energy, different energy sources. When everyone's like, oh, we need to focus on renewable. Bitcoin's the most renewable energy source, like demand out there. And it's gonna push the boundaries across nuclear, fusion, all of them. It'll expose the crap renewables because it'll just say that doesn't work compared to these other areas.

38:29We wanna buy it all up and we will be a economic actor within here. You want us to be the first buyer, the last buyer, whatever that may be. And so that's my long-winded way of saying I'm just so freaking bullish about all of these different areas and continuing to explore these areas. I definitely want to get into that convergence. But before we do, I'm curious how you're using AI. Because I remember last time we were hanging out in Nashville, we went and played golf and we were just talking for a while. And you're like a productivity maxi. It's unreal. You've got about 18 assistants. You're doing a thousand things at once.

39:01Like, how are you using AI? Because for me, it's definitely changed the way I work. I think it probably saves me at least half an employee, maybe a full employee in terms of what it will do for me. And if you go back even further, like a few years ago on what Bitcoin did, we were hiring people that would just not be relevant in the business today. Like we had a, she was amazing, but we had a lady who was doing all the transcriptions manually doing transcriptions for us. We had people pulling clips. There's now AI tools that pull clips and they've gone from being really shitty to being actually pretty good and there's probably no reason to have that person and like how are you using it yeah so i i would say in our the key is our systems right so it's not so much what's a role or what's something we want to go out we have basically each year or now this year as well as the years go forward we have like probably three to four major goals that we want to go and accomplish and then we go okay what are our systems to go and accomplish those goals and And then where can we incorporate any type of workflow such that the first answer is, can an AI agent, agentic agent do this or could some tool?

40:11So one for any small business owner out there, what I would recommend and it's worked well for us, I've empowered the team, not annual, but monthly. You have an unlimited budget to go and spend 10 bucks, 20 bucks, even 100 bucks a month on any new AI tool. you just have to use it and report back on how you're using it. So it's not an AI tool, but we use loom.com religiously and we loom each other videos all the time on how we're using. Why is that? I've not used that. So it's a screen recording tool that basically records your screen. So like, you know, before in other jobs, people would call me, Hey, I need to grab you for 10 minutes and talk to you about this idea.

40:51Now, when you're like, I'm on the golf course with you, I want to enjoy that round that's four, maybe whatever, five hours, instead of worrying about calls that are coming in and so on. And so when somebody's like, hey, I need some help around, I don't know, feedback on this creative just before I send out this tweet. There's a new style I wanted you to get your eyes on. Instead of sending me a static and a text or an email, it's a loom with their context. And this is not an AI tool, it's just more of a productivity tool of their thought process on it. Then I can comment within that video on exactly what I want to provide feedback to them or I say, great job, ship it.

41:30And we're rocking and rolling. And so asynchronous communication is a big thing and culturally here that I want to install at the park or continue to install and lead by example is because, dude, Dan, we got, I have four kids. I got a six-year-old, a five-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old. I coach, I think now two or three soccer teams. I like I'm volunteering as like the cross country coach and I'm volunteering. And my daughter wants me to go and volunteer for like lunch line because it's our first year being like the cafeteria lunch. And I'm like auto yes into all of that stuff. So but I don't want to take away from any of the work that I'm doing.

42:08So it's like, all right, if this is a known, how do I conform my life such that I want to prioritize this while excelling and maximizing in these other areas? So I just make sure to develop the tooling around that. I mean, there's no like secret to go on the AI side. There's no like, oh, this is the three tools. And they're not really AI tools. The three like tools that I was telling Jack this morning, I'm like, if they went away, it would really hurt my productivity in general. One is Whisperflow. The voice to text is unbelievable, especially on computer. Two is Raycast. It's like a spotlight on steroids.

42:50Just the clipboard history. Again, I'm on the left side of the bell curve. I have so much of my clipboard history. It is so much easier just to search for and then paste in there. And then third is that loom, which for our team, you know, Rob just welcomed the new baby girl and he's working different hours right now, but we're continuing to ship, especially for this Imagine If, which is now 25 days away. It's like, it's unbelievable. Voice to text is amazing, unless you're trying to talk to Siri when it's fucking terrible. No, Siri's garbage. This is where, you know, this is me being - It's insane that Siri's actually got worse.

43:28So when I did like this AI update, I was like really excited for it. I was like, this is what an iPhone needs. And it's got worse. It was better 10 years ago than it is today. heads need to roll over there and then they need to they and they will look this is what's going to happen they're going to acquire whisper flow like yesterday that's going to happen and it's going to be integrated and then it's going to be the default okay that's one two they're going to acquire raycast their spotlight still sucks raycast is the best so i could see them easily acquiring both of those and let a lady scene or whatever it was acquired loom i'm glad they're like leaving Loom as a standalone product.

44:10But those acquisitions make a ton of sense and they have a huge balance sheet. So leverage your balance sheet. You're not innovating at the workforce level. You're just not like, again, I'm a Bitcoiner. I look at proof of work. I don't care credentials. I don't care you've got a product roadmap. I don't care. I look at the product that is in right now that I'm using and I'm saying it is garbage. So it's just, they just got to, I don't know, other than acquisition is the way. Yeah, they've fucked it big time. It's funny, like you've obviously got four kids. You're a lunatic. I've got one under two.

44:47And like one of the things that I can't figure out is what the world looks like for them when they're hitting adulthood. Because like, obviously my daughter's two now. I actually think that's in some ways a better age to be than being sort of 12, 13? Because I think knowing what's going to happen in five years is literally impossible right now. At least there'll be some time for this to kind of mature before my daughter's at the age where she has to worry about having a job. But like, how do you see that? Like, how do you try and position this for your kids? So I think about this deeply and almost every single day.

45:23I don't try, like before it was, okay, maybe learn computer science, which I should have doubled down on and I was just too lazy and not smart. So I didn't do that. But, you know, oh, the safe route was go get an accounting degree or go get a, you know, XYZ degree. Gone. Gone. Well, gone in the sense that it's not a core, like we just got to rethink education across the board, in my opinion, like these alpha schools and all these different schooling schools. That's the area. I'm not like that crazy active parent that's like, hey, tell me what you're teaching my kids. But I'm slowly creeping there to be like, all right, tell me about - I think you'd be a nightmare to be a parent at this school.

46:07I'm just, I'm more interested in the tools that they're using to help with the education process because I do think each kid learns differently. And I think we're at a unique time where we can create unique learning plans for each and tailor them for each individual kid. But going back to that, it's literally anything that is super creative, I just want them to do. One other area, and I don't know if it's going to be right, but being able to confidently dictate and enunciate your thoughts into a clear, thoughtful sentence, prompt engineering is is going to be a must have. So my ability to go into ChatGBT or whatever and prompt it to do whatever.

46:52You may say, hey, draw me this cartoon. But if my daughter is like, draw me this elaborate blah, blah, blah, and adds like a million different adjectives and knows how to talk and make the AI dance, that's a superpower for her. So one thing we do, I drive her to school every single morning, is we call the AI thing on my phone, a question mark. And it's like, what's a question we want to ask our friend today? And she's like, why do birds hang on electric poles or whatever she asked? I was like, oh, great question. Okay. And then she's just talking with the AI. And then you can see when she tenses up, she's like, I don't know what to ask.

47:33I'm like, you just asked me that question. Just go ahead and ask it into the phone. And so you could see her confidence slowly just build up over time. And then she gets a little bit better. I mean, she's not like great at it, but she's just getting a little bit better, a little bit better. Then all of a sudden, you know, over time when I don't know at what age they introduce computers and all this other stuff, she'll be like, well, why am I typing into this? Why don't I just talk into this? And by the way, why are we, you know, asking a search engine that's kind of static, giving me the written form back?

48:07Why don't I talk to this? Why isn't it talking back to me. And that's how I get my answer. And by the way, I can tell it to provide me the answer too. So there's just a number of different ways where I'm like, you know, everyone's like, oh, we shouldn't introduce AI in schools and all this other stuff. That's insane to me. It seems like that's like banning an abacus or a calculator. Imagine banning the internet and you're like, hey man, I need you to do this by hand with a written pencil. That is not a real world use case, even in the slightest. I don't care if you're in the Amazon, you're not calculating anything.

48:41If you're stuck in the Amazon, like just not. And so, um, I would just say that that's where being an active parent, you know, it gives, you know, especially if you're a curious parent, which I am very curious about a number of different things. Um, you can be more involved with your kids and you don't have to, it's not like bringing the devices in there where they're, you know it's a bunch of screen time you can make it more conversational and more uh family oriented one of the things that i am a little bit doomer on on ai is what it does to the internet because i i've seen like a few reports and like the number the like amount of new content going on the internet the reports vary but it's like 40 to 75 percent of it is ai generated oh you see all like that absolute ai slop that ends up on twitter and it's just so uninteresting like do you think it makes the internet an unusable place?

49:33Well, for me, it doesn't personally because - But maybe in the future is what I'm really thinking here. I don't think so. I mean, I think probably people made that same argument when the dot-com era was born. It's like when Prodigy and AOL, they're like, wait a minute, why are they talking about, this is the dumbest thing. This is just a bunch of slop and crap on the internet. and we can't even search for it really well or it's disorganized or, you know, even the AI clipping, right? At the beginning, it was really crap. Now it's pretty good. You still, I do think you need a human in the loop. And that's where I think there's two spectrums in terms of hiring, to be honest with you.

50:13It's one is like, if you're mediocre, you're dead. Like just straight up, go find something. You gotta be, like gives you so much energy and that you strive to be the best at. Because if you don't find that, you're pretty DOA in any of these things. Because over time, an AI agent or something will just take your work. But if you're the best at AI clips, for example, you're like, yeah, I know how to make Riverside to whatever dance better than anybody else out there. And I'm so energized, but I'll always be at the forefront of this space. I'm going to go kill it. And you can literally write your own check because you'd be like, okay, for one clip for Danny, I could help him make an extra 50 ,000 bucks.

50:58What does that mean for his business? If I did 10 of those cool or a hundred of those great. Would that justify a hundred thousand dollar contract with Danny? And then I could go do that with 10 other Danny's. Maybe I have no idea, but that's how I would be looking at it. If I was, if I was an entrepreneur, but going back to the kid side, this is why I think a parent that's an entrepreneur. is so valuable is because I think the days of just being like, okay, I'm going to go to school. I'm going to work really hard. I'm going to go get a job at Google, or I'm going to go get a job at this company.

51:30Those big tech companies, they're not, there's no safety net anymore. I think the safety net is going to be in the entrepreneurial journey. And I think it's going to not force, but it's going to be an amazing renaissance of small business owners. I think it's going to be, And by the way, it does not even have to be in a podcaster to a techie or to an influencer. Absolutely not. You could go and take over a tire shop. And by the way, I'm very bullish on these freaking tire companies, Tangent, because like every month one of my tires is flat. I'm just like spending 200 bucks every month fixing them.

52:08I'm like another life. If any of my kids just want to go to a trade school, I will be the first to support them and be like, okay, go be the best tire changer guy, whatever it may be. But I think there's AI tooling within that workflow. Just think about those archaic systems and the archaic way they communicate with their customer base. And you're introducing just new novel ways of working with them, new novel ways of working with your employee base, new novel ways of just selling your product or services. Man, it is so, like, it does not even scratch the surface of what the future unfolds. So to your point, I couldn't agree more.

52:46A 12-year-old or even a 16-year-old, maybe in college, I'd be a little bit more nervous. And I'd always have my head on a swivel, even at 40 plus years old that I am, I have my head on a big time swivel. But like my six-year-old, my five-year-old, my three-year-old and my two-year-old, I'm just always constantly looking at them and saying, what are the things that they're passionate about and continue to support, whatever that may be. I am playing zero bias in that whole game. Yeah, I do think those kind of blue collar jobs are, they're going to be the ones that are the last to go. And one of my friends recently moved career from being like a very traditional normal career to he was like, not enjoying it, fed up, I'm going to just become a plumber.

53:26And this wasn't because of AI, but that's a genius move. Like AI will replace the job he was doing, but there's right now until we get really good robotics, it's not going to replace your plumber. So can I, okay, agreed. And then let me tell you about the convergence on something like plumbing or HVAC that I think could happen. So, and I got to give Tyler Stevens a shout out. His company. I love Tyler. Yeah, he's great. You should get him on the pod too. He's amazing. Just think about what if your home heating system was powered by Bitcoin miners? So you're monetizing it. What if the service folks knew that and knew how to service it and created an incentive model with you such that you didn't even pay for your unit?

54:13So a unit that I think I paid six grand to replace or maybe even 10 grand to replace my unit bothered me to no end. what if the guy was like, Tyler was like, hey man, it's$0 for you today. But the rev share model is I take 80 % of the sats and you take 20 % or whatever it is until I make my 10 grand back. And then it flips back to 80, 20 and 20 % is basically my monthly service fee. And by the way, now I have an incentive to come out to your home and going back to Proto Fleet. Proto Fleet is their fleet management software. So I think there is some AI tooling and you got to be careful about like throwing around AI all the time.

54:55Like AI does not need to be in every single freaking application. There's so many applications where I'm like, disallow the AI, disallow. You're just like, I do not need you in this application right now. But that's one where it could be proactive to sense like, oh, there's an irregularity with the fan speed. And we've looked at our entire data set and noticed that there's a common issue with that type of the way the fan is acting. that we think in the next 32 days that that fan could go down. You may wanna go look at it. So it's a yellow right now. And then it becomes a red 10 days. And it's like, holy smokes, let's go replace that.

55:29But imagine like Tyler then sees that data. All you care about is it's the winter. I wanna freaking heat my home, okay? The heat's gotta be on. I don't need to call you up when it breaks and the heat, I'm one or two days out of heat. And now Tyler has an incentive to make sure your home is functioning at like the highest possible usage as possible. So there's a really amazing convergence between Bitcoin, AI, energy use, open source freedom tech tools. By the way, all of these tooling that Tyler and Exergy could be using are all in these open source home mining tools. So like open source firmware to control the miner.

56:14There's just on a number of different fronts there. Yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, Tyler's doing heating with using Bitcoin mining. And I think he's now got it up and running out of the space. He showed me his rig there when I was over there a few months ago. It's a very cool project. Guys, there's like hundreds of Tylers out there. And we're going to discover thousands of Tylers out there. I truly believe it. The more we can talk about it, the more we got great folks like you guys, you, Danny, doing the What Bitcoin Did podcast, other podcasts out there that shine a light on all the cool stuff that's happening in Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining, people will be like, wait a minute, I own a duplex in Western Mass.

56:52Hey, how do I do that with my place? I want to heat my, I don't, screw paying the electricity bill. I already, it's a sunk cost, 400, 500, a hundred dollars a month, whatever that may be. And by the way, I have tenants in there that it's all in part of the rent because my rent is tough to, you know, I got to provide extra incentives. I might as well just put a home mining, uh, uh, heat it with home miners so that even if they jack it up, at least I'm getting the sats from it. Yeah. It's very cool. But so everything you've talked about here is that convergence between Bitcoin AI energy and you're doing imagine if now in Nashville in, is it less than a month ago?

57:32I think 25 days. Tell everyone about this. What's going on? Yeah. So, uh, imagine if has been this idea, uh, been thinking a lot about, um, honestly, I've been really fortunate. I'm not a podcaster, but I don't know. But you've got three podcasts or something. Yeah, I don't know. Matt and you are the podcasters, and you guys are crushing it. But I've been very fortunate to do one with ECO, Pod256, which is focused on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. And then I do a monthly Bitcoin podcast with Kathy Wood, who's the founder, CEO, and CIO at ARK Invest, and that's called Bitcoin Brainstorm. so she's been very kind for the last almost two years now she's been like rod you create and curate the audience we will produce and distribute it across our platforms and i'd like to be there for the podcast i was like heck yeah kathy let's rock honestly i thought she would just do one episode she's busy blah blah dude she has not missed one episode with me it's been unbelievable i mean and i've had like our bitcoin friends they're they range the spectrum right you know You know, I've brought Luke on.

58:44I've brought Rockstar on. I've brought like everybody on. Did not bat one eye. It's like, let's rock. Let's talk about this. Let's talk about that. And, you know, I've had Eric Hurstman on, Harry on, Odell on, Mauler's on. It's been so freaking cool. Anyways, so, and she's been like kind of incepting this in me. And I've been thinking a lot about it because especially on the AI side, but really on the energy side, because that's been a big focus at the park. And I want to always bring the conversation back to the importance of free and open source software, because sometimes it gets lost in the entire conversation.

59:19Like, hey, we're talking about treasury companies this like next cycle, or we're talking about XYZ. And it's like, wait a minute, guys, closed source, proprietary, highly regulated moats are not the way Bitcoin succeeds long term for 8 billion people. Let's continue to bring it back to make this attainable to run a full node. and the importance of that to custody your own Bitcoin and to use Bitcoin the way you want to use it. And so with Imagine If, I wanted to bring between 300 or 500 folks that are from capital allocators to policymakers to entrepreneurs to energy producers and personally invite them to come and experience this.

59:59And it's the summit of summits. And Kathy's in, Dr. Laffer's in, Adam Back's coming, Odell's coming. I mean, just go look at the speaker list. There's going to be a number of speakers that are going to be featured. There's going to be a number of speakers we don't even announce. We just announce them post facto. And that's, I think, what makes the park pretty special in terms of the experiences we create. At the park, we have a no photos and no social media policy. For this one, probably on the stage level, we'll obviously have photos and video and we'll do video recording. But I think... I'm cautiously optimistic that this will be a really special one.

1:00:40And I hope this becomes more of a based TED, if you're into that TED. And if you know the All In Summit, which I think those guys do a really, really good job, this one is more focused on the freedom tech side. So if you're interested in Bitcoin AI energy and open source freedom tech, consider signing up and getting a spot. i think it's really cool because like there's a million bitcoin conferences now there's probably quite literally one every week um all over the world but a lot of them are kind of the same format um i think a few run for like a year or two have a load of hype and then end up dying down a little bit like it with cheat code in bedford we try and do things a bit differently we we try and make that a really fun event the football is a central part of it um so we normally have like one day of conference we might actually go to two this year but we'll see um and then there's the football date where everyone just drinks beer, hangs out, has a good time.

1:01:34And I think that is the day that everyone enjoys the most because really people want to go and see their favorite Bitcoiners and hang out and just chat. What you've done is kind of lean into the other side where this is just going to be education, like a very serious full day of content. I think that's the way these events are going to actually survive. There's obviously the big Bitcoin conference, which you worked on back in the day, right? That's obviously, that's here to stay. That's absolutely crushing. They get an insane amount of people. But otherwise, I think you have to differentiate yourself in some way.

1:02:04And I think this is a really interesting idea. Yeah, I would break it down into two areas. Again, we have one kind of a mental model, which is how do we make this the best Bitcoin experience and best Bitcoin and Freedom Tech experience you'll ever experience, right? Full stop. Even compared to other Bitcoin park experiences, How do we continue to make this the best experience? There's three currencies, in my opinion, time, capital, and reputation. You're using arguably one of your most important currencies, which is your time to physically come to Bedford, to Nashville, to Austin, wherever. And I do not sleep on that in the slightest or take that for granted.

1:02:44So I'm like, all right, how do we make this the one day or two days, the best possible experience? And I look at it into two kind of simple takeaways. ways. One is their specific knowledge and specific is the key word, specific knowledge that I otherwise would not have attained, uh, and, uh, without being here physically. Right. And so it's like, okay, how do I get the best conversation going with Kathy and Dr. Laffer? Oh, Bitstein, for example, we're going to announce him as one of the speaker. I put Bitstein and Adam back together that, you know, Bissing's only met Adam two times in his life.

1:03:21I'm like, are you serious? So we were doing some prep work and so on. And I'm like, Bitsy, I think this is going to be one of the best just fireside chats ever because your curiosity and your deep understanding of the philosophy, economics and technical aspects of Bitcoin and the way you can probe and get that out of a guy like Adam back on stage. I think that could just be magical. And so I'm trying to create all these different magical experiences, you know, such that people be like, okay, I just, just that one panel was worth the price of admission, worth my time and my reputation. I always want to be around all these folks.

1:04:01And the second one is networking. Like is like getting, this is a weird thing and it's probably not the best thing, but, but I'm going to do it until, you know, I can't do it anymore, which is we curate the audience as well, because there is a price tag. Our summits are$500 per ticket. We've had the same price since we started it in 2023. NEMS all the way up until every single summit we've done, and we've kept the price the same ticket. And there's only a finite number of tickets there. For Imagine If, it's a summit of summits. I think four of these summits. So again, on the left side of the bell curve, I was like four times five minus one.

1:04:42That's$1 ,999. Great. That's the price of this ticket. And I'm like, all right, what does the value need to like, how can we justify this value in the audience seat? And that's why I want to make sure that you're when you're investing that capital, that is the best possible experience. Now, with that said, 90 plus percent of our meetups and workshops are free and open to the public too, which is just, I love that because you get any person, whether you're a college student or a retiree grandparent that wants to learn about custody, that wants to learn like, hey, I heard about this thing called Noster.

1:05:22Can you tell me a little bit more about this? Or they just want to be around like-minded people. And I think there's a responsibility. going back to your Brisbane meetup, going back to the meetups in Austin, going back like meetups in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I think there's a responsibility of Bitcoiners that have the means and have the desire and energy to start a meetup and just to be that signal amongst their community. Because I do think, especially when you go down the YouTube rabbit holes, down the Twitter rabbit holes. You know, I like Trump's doing a lot of really good things, in my opinion, one of which I completely disagree with, which is these mean coins and then just putting out that grift.

1:06:02It's like when when people are like, well, if the president's doing there, just a lot of different noise and different things going out there that as Bitcoiners, again, more power to you. You can do do do you and do whatever you think is best. If you think what's best for Bitcoin is educating the populace on how to use Bitcoin, how to save in Bitcoin and all the great benefits of Bitcoin, then I think, you know, playing a role in this, whether it's starting a conference, starting a meetup, being an educator, I think is massive. Well, I think it's very cool. I wish I could be there this year. I'm not going to be able to make it, unfortunately, but next year I will 100 % be there.

1:06:43Heck yeah, man. And I'm going to be in Nashville in October, so I'm excited. We've got to try and play some golf again we could absolutely do that man all right well rod i really appreciate the time and this has been a lot of fun dude thank you so much danny the pleasure was all mine