Bitcoin Host Explains Why Digital Money Can't Be Hacked and Boomers Live in Different Reality

Vance Crowe [00:00:07] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. We have a real treat for me. The only podcast I listen to consistently week, weekend, week out, I am waiting for it at the end of Wednesday, is a podcast called, of course, this week in Bitcoin. And after a couple of years of, of wanting this and really being excited about it, Chris Fisher has agreed to join the podcast. So Chris, welcome to the podcast. Thank

Chris Fisher [00:00:34] You very much. Yes. And I'm sorry I made you wait a little bit. I am horrible with email and I thought anybody who is this patient with me deserves a chat.

Vance Crowe [00:00:44] Well, I'm pretty excited because your, you know, your knowledge of Bitcoin, the depth that you go to, the quality of the show that you do tells me that you've got kind of a screw loose and, and there's some other like, overlapping things that are really interesting for me. So you are really into Bitcoin. You have a podcast on Linux and you have like a, a big tribe around you, but I heard you recently talking about raising chickens. What's, what's up with that? How did you get involved in that? You

Chris Fisher [00:01:12] Know, I don't even, I don't even know how these things happen. It's my fault. But we, we've been living on a farm for about a year and I was driving home one day and I was just sort of visualizing chickens running around the property. And that's a fun idea. And I thought, wait a minute, I could just, I could just get chickens. I, I live on a farm, I could, how hard could chickens be? Of course, I didn't really think about the whole coop and henhouse thing, but you know, that turned out to be a great tech challenge, right? Because in 2026, if you're gonna build a chicken coop, you want motion sensors, ammonia sensors, cameras, automated doors and feeders, right? So it was really a tech opportunity, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And I mean, I don't regret it, but they're, they're, they're a lot of fun. So I don't regret,

Vance Crowe [00:01:56] So it's pretty automated. Is it a stationary barn? A pretty automated barn? Yeah.

Chris Fisher [00:02:00] Yeah. And, and we built, so it's, it's off the side of our barn and we built a chicken coop just off the side of the barn with, with as much automation as I could do, including lighting and, and heating, all the, and all of that. Even even the eggs. The eggs, the door will open in the morning and they can go in and they can roost and then the, the eggs fall outta back into a trapped door and then the access is closed off. So they can't go in there and do anything but lay eggs even that's automated. And we're really, we're trying to go for this, this idea of, well, what if we wanted to be able to leave for a week or two, you know, fantasize about going on like a two week road trip or something, and we want our animals to stay alive. And there's just a lot of really good technology out there. It's really why I got into Bitcoin is it's open source free software, and if you know how to put the pieces together, you can do it all for free, you know, minus the hardware cost. But no cloud subscription, no, no big tech person that can turn off your access or change the direction of a company when they, they want to go all in on ai, it's all yours. And so you can do stuff like put cameras in places maybe you normally wouldn't because you're not comfortable with it, but when it's, when it's not on the internet and it's under your full control, you just have more optionality. And so it's just this, it's this, it's like another way to physically integrate free software and open source into my life. Sort of like Bitcoin,

Vance Crowe [00:03:20] How much of the stuff you're automating with your, with your chicken coop is like, Hey, there's another guy that already thought of this problem and Oh yeah, you're just grabbing it, or you're like, no, I gotta tinker with it.

Chris Fisher [00:03:31] Both, you know, there's a big community online of people that are doing this, especially in the home assistant community. It's a lot of people are solving different problems. Everybody has their own approach though, and their own particular goal. So you always kind of have to take the best of the ideas out there and kind of go your own direction, I find. So it's still sort of bespoke but inspired and it's, it's pretty great. Like there's, like, when it comes to cameras, how do you pick a great camera that isn't gonna be spying on you and reporting to somebody offline or, or whatever, like, or is gonna be compatible and it won't, won't be bricked in five years. All, there's so many resources online now to do that, so, well this employment,

Vance Crowe [00:04:12] This is actually a problem I've been working on because I'm kind of an arborist and what I wanna see is time lapse photos of my front yard Yeah. And my backyard, so I can tell what the shade is and like how it moves. And because I planted more trees than any of the satellite maps come up with, so I can't just rely on theirs. But then I started looking into cameras and I'm like, I don't really wanna stream my front yard and backyard to the world. Yeah. How do I set this up so that it's just mine and I don't have to go out there with an SD card every, you know, week or so and go get it? Like, what is the way to do this? So you're telling me this is possible? Oh

Chris Fisher [00:04:48] Yeah, yeah. The, the real magic is the frigate DVR, it's open source and it just is compatible with all of these different types of cameras. And it gives you a dashboard where you can see all your camera feeds and you can see events and you can set up time lapses and recordings, and you can even have it do object recognition if you have some horsepower to throw at it. Or if you get a coral USB device, which is usually under a hundred bucks, it'll do animal recognition, face recognition. It can detect if somebody's showing up with a package in their hands, or if a new vehicle rolls up where the license plate isn't in the database, it can detect that, hey, a new car shows up and I don't know this car, and that's all local, it's all free.

Vance Crowe [00:05:31] That's what I want is the local, 'cause I've done the nest thing, right? Like there's some amount of security that I just, I, I need to have and or would like to have. And, and so like, I'm pretty well aware, but at the end of the day, that is going on to somebody else's servers. Anybody else can see it. If, if the government comes along and is like, oh, there was a crime in your area, we'd like to just come along and grab that footage you got there. I don't want, I don't want them. I, I just, I want it much more on my terms than than somebody else's.

Chris Fisher [00:05:59] Yeah. And it's not even, you know, the, like we recently, speaking of Nest, we recently learned a story about Nest was able, or Google was able to recover footage from a customer's account who wasn't even paying for the storage, but they still had a copy of the video, they just didn't make the video available to the customer unless they paid for

Vance Crowe [00:06:16] It.

Chris Fisher [00:06:17] So there's that. But you know, you think about it in the age of AI training, there's that element as well is they may not even be, you know, releasing it to somebody or they could just be training on it. And maybe you're comfortable with that, maybe you're not, but it's a whole level, another level of consideration when you think about services and data collection.

Vance Crowe [00:06:36] It's a wild world out there. And it's funny to me, the, the, the amount of surveillance that people are way comfortable with just outside of my house is a flock camera. And I noticed that they actually put them in based on our city council without a public voter or anything. It was just like, oh, this is a part of public safety. You were just gonna put these things up. And so I cannot leave my house really without there being a camera that takes it. And I mean, I'm, I'm talking like less than a quarter of a mile and bang, I'm already getting hit by that thing.

Chris Fisher [00:07:06] Same, yeah, same thing here, coming there going from the studio all directions, there's a flock camera, same, no vote or anything like that. And it's been a bit of a contentious point in our local communities, but they persist. And that, that's a great example of a lot of data collection that's probably being used for training. And I don't even, I don't even know if people re realize what's happening with the flock cameras. That's a particularly insidious one that's just crept in

Vance Crowe [00:07:31] Recently. No, no, no. And I mean, like, if you talk to the boomers about this, I've been kind of on a kick lately. We could get into that in a little bit, but like if you talk to the boomers about it, it's all good. There are no trade-offs.

Chris Fisher [00:07:43] And

Vance Crowe [00:07:43] Then, you know, like I, and they'll immediately be like, well, don't you feel more secure if somebody came to rob your house? And like, well after they're done robbing my house, maybe they could go find them, but they're, it's not gonna stop it. It doesn't make me any safer. And so I'm giving up 100% of my ability to just traverse without being tracked for a nebulous thing that may or may not help me at all. Yeah,

Chris Fisher [00:08:05] It's hard to really wrap your head around too about the exponential ability to do more with existing data so we can collect stuff for years that we don't have any capability of doing much with right now. But in 2035 when models and AI are just absolutely unbelievable powerful machines, nothing stops them from going back and reviewing all of that data and trying to find anything or any pattern or anything like that at any point. And you never know what political party or or whoever will be in charge or whatever company it might be at that time. So it's just something to consider. I'm not, I'm not trying to panic about it, but I don't think people are weighing it in the pros and cons very much because it's hard to understand how exponential the mining of that data is going to grow. It's just,

Vance Crowe [00:08:51] It's, and I mean, you only need to look at a history book that goes back, you know, a few years, few decades to see that as soon as the wrong government's there, they they want it. Right? Like, and they, they're willing to pay people to come and lie about it. Imagine if you gave them actually all of the, all of the data. It's, it's insane to me. But maybe this kind of leads to a conversation I've been having. So I just had a guy on my podcast named Mark Reardon, and in St. Louis, this guy is like the daytime DriveTime talk show host, and he really is nailing the boomer generation, right? Because nobody, very few people besides boomers are listening to broadcast radio. And so it's very interesting to talk with him about what is his information bubble versus like a, a millennial Bitcoin ag person, right? Is you are an ir we're probably similar tribes in that way. The the, the information gap is so wide that I think we almost don't live in the same country. And I'm, I'm not saying that to be hyperbolic. I mean it literally, because our information spheres are so totally different.

Chris Fisher [00:09:56] Yeah. And I think it's, it's a product of timing and it's what I've, I try to talk about it and not be disparaging about it, but it's, it is totally different information, systemic information sources and their experience is a very different experience than the millennial generation. Their experience, just, they've sort of, from my perspective, have have gotten to ride the fiat wave to, to its best perks. Like they, they've been around, of course there was ups and downs in the eighties and the nineties and in and, and in 2008 and all of that. But they have been around during a relatively high period of money printing a relatively easy market where really you could put your money in an SMP index and just ride that, you know, you could do things like put your money in a CD and earn interest and pay for retirement with that interest. And those strategies worked. You could, you could, you'd work. My my dad worked at a job for 30 years, the same job for 30 years. That's unheard of in my generation. And he's now sitting on a very, very robust, I guess retirement package. It's, you know, it is what it is. But I just think that's a totally different experience. I don't really have a retirement package. I, I mean, I own my own business, right? Because there, there wasn't really the opportunity for me in at least what I felt in the, in the regular work field. It's a totally different experience there. Plus I've been around, I entered the job world around the year 2000, and it has been the.com boom, it's been the 2008 financial crisis, of course there was nine 11 in there.

Chris Fisher [00:11:28] And then since 2008 it has just been a completely different financial res regime. And now, now we live in a period where we're nearly, we're nearly $40 trillion in debt. We live in what I call a period of fiscal dominance where fiscal policy dominates everything, the central bank, the private markets lending. And this is a completely different reality than it was when the boomers were coming up. And so you combine that with traditional news sources, which are also rooted in this legacy architecture. And just with systemic different experiences gr growing up in the economy, it is totally different dialogues. It is completely different worlds. It's, it is that movie, a movie B effect. And it's, it's hard to bridge the path. You're,

Vance Crowe [00:12:12] You're right to, to call that out. Like the experience of inflation if you own assets is hey, the world is getting better. Yeah. And if you don't own assets, hey the world is getting worse. And those two worlds don't actually cross at any, at a meaningful level, I guess you see a lot of parents and, and grandparents that are doing well. And so I for example, interview people to tell their life stories. And so many of people's experience of life was they had time to do things like go to the PTA meeting. They were a part of the city council. They were a part of the, you know, roads and Bridges commission. And they're baffled why we don't have as much time now. And I think a lot of times the, the conclusion is reached, the reason that young people don't have time is they want so many more material things than what we wanted. We had a simpler life. And so because they want so many material things, they don't have time to do this other stuff. And my read is not that, my read is that the value of your dollars are going so much less far. Both people have to work. Both people have to be busy. They don't have to be, but the, if we were to do a poverty comparison, they would not be the same because the purchasing power of your dollars has gone down so much.

Chris Fisher [00:13:28] Yeah. And the knock on effect, the second order effects of that are, are really, really powerful. They, they reshape the family structure. And you know what I look at it, the, the moment that we are in right now is, is with Bitcoin is I think where the boomers were with real estate 30 years ago, 35 years ago, where real estate was, it was still scarce, but the pricing was unbelievably low. Especially here, I'm in the western side of Washington state where there is not an inch left. You know, like everything's claimed. Every inch is claimed. And I, I just cannot get into that market. Even a, a a, a piece of land that might be less than an acre that doesn't have even running water or sewage could still go for $700,000. It's just, it's just, it's bonkers right now. And those, those kinds of prices have completely, completely priced out an entire generation. So they're putting more into rent, they're putting more into car loans. The car loans are absolutely ridiculous. They're getting eaten alive by interest rates, especially if they're putting their debt on credit cards, right? Where this, where the boomer generation, like you said, is much more asset rich. And when you're asset rich like that, that gives you access to, to lending options that are significantly lower in rates. It just gives you a flexibility and a comfort too in life to know that, you know, you bought your house at 75,000 and now it's worth a million dollars. Like that, that those kinds of gains give you a peace of mind that you just, I'd think a lot of the millennial generation younger don't have.

Chris Fisher [00:15:03] And the situation may be even worse for people younger than the millennials in a lot of cases.

Vance Crowe [00:15:08] Well, I talk a a lot about, you know, do you teach your children to set up a savings account? Because if you go talk with the older generation, you say the, you know, this monetary system is wildly different now than it was before. They'll be like, nowadays, there used to be really high interest rates. And, and look what happened in the eighties. And they definitely went through monetary regime. Hell, I'm not, I'm not saying they had a good time.

Chris Fisher [00:15:31] It was famous.

Vance Crowe [00:15:32] But the difference is that it, back in then those days, if you did have money and you put it in a savings account, as long as, you know, with the FDI and C insurance, whatever that was, you had a certain amount of saving money is a valuable thing. 'cause it's not gonna get all burned away to inflation. Now if you found out a parent was giving their kid the best advice they could by, hey, take 10% of your paycheck and put it into your savings account, you'd be like, this terrible advice. This is not going to work. This is going to, this is gonna just burn so much of your effort. And that just goes to show you just how deeply endemic the, the change has been. And yet people don't think that we are in a different regime.

Chris Fisher [00:16:13] I do think the incentives that just organically creates is why we are seeing things like prediction markets take off like crazy. And why a couple of years ago we saw things like NFTs and then meme coins go absolutely nuts. And now we're seeing that this push to tokenize real estate and tokenize absolutely everything, oil, all these things, so that way we can sell, sell and sell. It's this financialization of, of, of incentives to try to beat inflation, to try to just outpace inflation. And now to do that, you essentially gotta gamble or be some sort of amazing investor to beat inflation. It's, it's crushing for people. And if you don't play the game, yeah, even setting, I mean realistically, even setting 20% aside probably doesn't beat inflation. If you're paying for your fuel, you're paying for energy, right? For your home and you're paying for groceries, like all of those have seen more than 20% inflation.

Vance Crowe [00:17:16] So when, when did you, what was the epiphany moment on Bitcoin for you? What was the the come to this technology?

Chris Fisher [00:17:25] So I think the two big moments, well maybe there was three, but 2008 I realized by not paying attention to the financial world, I really nearly got quite, got quite penalized for that when I was trying to build a home. And of course I tried to do it at the absolute wrong time when it came to financing it. And I was totally oblivious to it. And I, it just caught me blindsided blind. And I realized, oh, by, by just totally focusing on Linux and open source and technology and work and family, I guess all these things that you already have to do, like, but by, but by excluding this area of my life, I got nicked. I almost got completely taken out. I I need to pay more attention to this. And so that was a, that was a real learning experience. Then I discovered Bitcoin kind of through this educational process and I really was drawn to it because it's a decentralized peer-to-peer open source technology, which those are very, very, very hard to kill. And usually once they begin to get network effect and then the network effect grows, it continues to grow. It's just a matter of time. And so that, I was interested taking everything else aside about Bitcoin, just those core principles of it. I was like, oh, that's, that's particularly intriguing. But then as I continued my education about money and particularly the US financial situation, I started to become more convicted about Bitcoin as I learned what was good money and hard money and the issue of inflation and why a limited supply of an asset protects you from inflation.

Chris Fisher [00:18:57] And how if you were to somehow create the most pristine clinical asset possible, it would end up being Bitcoin. The only problem would be is somebody would've created it and they would be around and they'd be like a CEO. But Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, either through unfortunate circumstances or through incredible foresight, left the project and it became truly a decentralized open source project. And, and even Satoshi had to actually mine the original Bitcoin, right? Like Satoshi didn't issue coins via code. Satoshi had to run the software and run the mining software. It was easy at the time. But even Satoshi themselves mined their own Bitcoin, which is totally counter to how all of the other altcoins for the most part work where they, the creators issue themselves a bag and all of that. And so you have this, you have this hard asset that was genuinely scarce. And I, I started watching it probably when it was around maybe, maybe even a dollar. I mean, it, it, back then it just kept crashing all the time. So I couldn't really say, and I went through multiple, multiple wallets getting hacked. I, I, I lost what would now be generational wealth in the mount got hack. It was painful, still painful, still painful. I don't even wanna say the number 'cause it's that painful. And, and you know, through all of that though, why I remained convicted was because I knew the advantage of something like that being open source and free because I had that understanding from the Linux side early in from the late nineties.

Chris Fisher [00:20:29] And I understood the advantage of hard money, something that was truly met the classifications of hard money. And so you combine that with what seemed to be an inevitable fiscal math of the Western financial situations with increasing debt and increasing money printing it just like, once again, humanity invented this very solution to their problems at just the moment they'd needed it. And this is a pattern that repeats through history, right? As we are about to blow things up metaphorically, we kind of come along with the invention that saves us. And that's what we're doing once again with Bitcoin. And it's the separation of state and money. It's really the separation of banks and money too, because it's a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol. And like the web is, the web is based on HTTP, that HTTP in your, in your web browser is the hyper text transport protocol, which rides on top of the TCP IP protocol. Bitcoin is a money protocol. And on top of that rides the Bitcoin token and other things. And, and once you start to kind of understand how powerful that is and how necessary it is for the future of finance, the conviction was, was just sort of like rock solid at that point. So then it was like, you know, what do you do with that? Well, you make a podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:21:46] My natural tendency is to be like, oh, this is where I got in on Bitcoin. But I actually think the more interesting thing that you're talking about is that protocol layer and then what it allows you to do, you know, some of the most basic parts of what Bitcoin allows you to do is me send money from me to you without being like, Hey, I, what are the different PayPal or all, you know, bank of America, would you do that payment? That one is the obvious one. But when you think about the benefits of Bitcoin, what it enables humans to do, what, what comes to mind for you?

Chris Fisher [00:22:18] I don't think we fully appreciate how necessary a fully trustable, fully reliable store of value is because we have lived in a fiat society for our entire lives. I don't think we can to the gold bugs get it. The gold bugs get it. But the gold bugs were early. They were very early. And I, the pay the pain of inflation and the pain of 40 years of bad fiscal decisions hasn't yet created the market conditions where the average people are looking for a solution to that pain. But it is coming, it's all, it's here now. It is here now. I mean, look at the Bitcoin ETFs. That's why the Bitcoin ETFs have done so incredibly well. It's here now, but it's just, it's only, it's only beginning. So the ability to take your time and effort today and store it in the future and get possibly more for it than you're getting today is the complete reverse. When you're getting paid in cash today, you're getting paid in something somebody else prints for free and you're gonna get less value for your time and energy five, 10 years, three years a year, even in the future because of inflation. I wanna say that again, the stuff that you are doing right now, all of the hard work, everything you are busting your butt for and getting paid in, you're gonna get less for that work in a year and even less in three and even less in five. That is, that is a complete flip with Bitcoin. With Bitcoin in five years, I'm gonna gonna get more for that effort and I'm gonna get more for that time. I just have to be willing to wait.

Chris Fisher [00:23:49] I just have to have the patience to wait. And because it's a scarce asset, because there's a limited quantity, there isn't inflation with Bitcoin, there will only ever be 21 million coins. So it's a, it is, it is the solution to inflation. And so for me, that's all the other stuff. Transferring value, being able to build applications and services and lending and all of that is very important and it's very useful. But for average everyday folks, the fact that they could open up the cash app or the strike app or whatever it is, and by $25 of a hard asset that appreciates some value every, you know, four to five years significantly is an unlock that I don't think we have processed yet as a species. Because before if you wanted access to that kind of value storage, you had to go buy a hundred thousand, a million dollar piece of property, whatever it was, or you had to go buy a bunch of gold or you had to go bet on silver or something like that, or oil even, right? But we were, you know, I can't go buy oil and I certainly can't go buy a a million dollar piece of property, but every Friday I could buy a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin and just put in a bank account

Vance Crowe [00:24:59] And it doesn't cost you anything to, to keep that money going, keep it safe. Like once it's safe, it's safe. You, I think one of the hardest ideas for people to wrap their minds around is the idea of actual digital scarcity. That you could create a digital thing that can't be replicated. Most of the time people are like, well, why do I even care about that? And then two, even if you do like getting them to get to the construction part of, well how would you make a photograph digital that couldn't be replicated? You can't,

Chris Fisher [00:25:31] Yeah, yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:25:32] The, there's so much work that has to go into understanding in order to be, to have that sense of awe that I have whenever I discover something new about how, how far ahead they thought.

Chris Fisher [00:25:44] Yeah, it's, it's, it's humbling when you, you know, the, the Bitcoin white paper is pretty easy to find and the first eight pages are just, it's incredible the foresight and, and the thought that went into it and, and you're, you're absolutely right. I think there's, there's so many different to, there's so many different layers to to that, but the simplicity of Bitcoin is that it can just be this trustable base layer. And, and the reason why I wanna focus on trust is because we don't really have much of it anymore. We don't really trust the media. We don't really trust the government. We don't trust medical institutions. We don't really trust, I don't trust the banks at all. You know, PayPal has several hundred dollars of mine completely locked up right now, and I have to fill out 17 in individual forms and then plead with them to reinstate access to my account. And the reason why they blocked it is because I was doing a fundraiser for a road trip on the podcast and we got an uptick in, in contributions, and they shut the whole thing down and seized the funds. And I don't, so I don't trust PayPal anymore. I'm never gonna use PayPal for that again. I've completely lost trust in PayPal. And so the, the, the thing that is so powerful is that it's mathematically trustable. There's nobody running it. There's no company making a profit. And the way that when, like, when I was talking about with the white paper, the humbling, just incredible foresight is the way all of the economic incentives work so that the system itself is self-sustaining. It is, it is economically more viable to participate in the Bitcoin network than it is to attack the Bitcoin network and, and at every level.

Chris Fisher [00:27:15] And that is one of the true geniuses of the design. It's, it's brilliant.

Vance Crowe [00:27:20] Explain that I, I understand what you're talking about, but it's definitely worth picking at and explaining and giving something for people to wrap their minds around. Okay.

Chris Fisher [00:27:28] So one of the key things about Bitcoin to understand, to set it up is Bitcoin automatically adjusts what's called the hash rate. That's the, the difficulty amount. It automatically adjusts the difficulty so that the amount of hash rate that's required based on how much power is coming to the network. So if somebody comes online and they wanna add a bunch of power to the network, they can do that for a little while, but the network will automatically adjust so that the issuance schedule of Bitcoin remains the same. So what that kind of sets up is, it means that if you wanna attack the Bitcoin network and try to take over something like that, the amount of power you would have to bring is more than anybody could muster any government, anybody. Right now it's an incredible wall of hash rate that that has to be, that has to be penetrated in order for you to take over the network. And even once you do the incentives lay out such that the price of Bitcoin would crash and it's not worth anything if somebody were to take over, if they could somehow, if, if China, Russia, India, and maybe Australia, I don't know, they got a lot of solar, if they all came together and put all of the Asics in the world to try to take over the Bitcoin network, they may be able to produce enough hash rate, but then the value of Bitcoin would go to zero. So there's an incentive there to not do that. The incentive is if you have that kind of hash rate, is to just participate in the network. And it's true for the miners, it's true for the node operators. It's, it's a, it's a brilliant system.

Vance Crowe [00:28:49] Yeah. I think one of the things about talking to people about Bitcoin is that you will lay out the actual structure of it, but you have to only go deep enough that people don't have their eyes glaze over. But then the response can be the equivalent of like, yeah, but what happens if cars could fly? And then you're like, okay, well if cars could fly, you know, if you could muster together all of this electricity and you could do this thing, then you'd see, well actually I could make a ton more money by just adding the hash rate and getting paid in this Bitcoin. But you, the, the challenge is you can come up with imaginary things to thwart Bitcoin, but unless you're talking to somebody that actually really knows how the structure works, you can't, you don't come up against a strong enough opposition to totally ridiculous criticisms.

Chris Fisher [00:29:39] Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think it's, it's hard to conceive that so many things were thought of. I think when a common criticism I also hear is, well what if they just changed the 21 million cap? You know, what if just code? What if they just go in there and they change from 21 to 50 million? And I, I, that is an understandable thing because in the world of computers so far, you know, Microsoft, they have word or whatever it is, and they can just make a random change to it, and they ship you a new version and, and now it's completely different. And they, they can arbitrarily do that. So it's, it's a reasonable concern. But again, it's you if you, the brilliance of it, like if you're truly interested, the white paper does lay it out. But it's, it's, it all is a combination of factors. It's the issuant schedule, it's the difficulty adjustment. It's all of these things that come together that, that form the 21 million cap. There's no, there's no line of code in Bitcoin that says number of Bitcoin equal that you can just change. It would be an absolute re-architecture of the protocol, which then you would have to have every mining pool and every node operator adopt across the board to agree to, and the the incentives just wouldn't be there. So it's, it's just, i i, again, it's humbling in its brilliance and I i it makes me wonder if Satoshi could have been a team of people or if one person just could be that brilliant.

Vance Crowe [00:30:59] I know, I mean that's the question you, you think about that. I've never seen a committee do something so beautiful.

Chris Fisher [00:31:05] That's true. And,

Vance Crowe [00:31:06] And it really is beautiful and it kind of feels like it's so beautiful that it probably was, you know, some sort of divine, you know, message. I don't know about you, but for me, creativity, when I come up with some creative, it's not mine. I'm just the one that detected it, right.

Chris Fisher [00:31:21] The timing of it, it feels a bit divine as well. I mean, it's just as we needed a solution like this, just as the 2008 financial crisis was coming along.

Vance Crowe [00:31:30] Yeah. I feel like maybe there's a guy that gets to access the selden, you know, room and, and go in. Are you, you're, are you familiar with the Selden crises?

Chris Fisher [00:31:39] No, but I, I like a good time travel reference if that's what it is.

Vance Crowe [00:31:42] Well, it's actually, it's, it's kind of, you'll like this, it's an Isaac Asimov reference. Okay. And he's talking about the, the, the propagation through time where like, how does the civilization go from being multi-planetary to universal? And they always end up coming into these crises points where they go to this guy who was a psycho historian and they say, what, what do we do? And then he comes back and is like, ah, right in your moment of need, this is the thing you'll need.

Chris Fisher [00:32:09] And

Vance Crowe [00:32:09] Bitcoin seems to be one of those.

Chris Fisher [00:32:11] Yeah, yeah. Indeed. And it much like the internet, TCP IP and HTT p it's a protocol that today we look at as a way of, you know, moving a, a coin that's, you know, worth about 60 something thousand dollars as we talk right now. And I think that's how we think about Bitcoin today. I don't know exactly how, but much like Linux was in the late nineties. It was just this really basic system. And now here we are in 2026 and entire industries, right? Things like GitHub and Microsoft Azure and AWS, they're all running on top of Linux. And I, I, I have to wonder if it isn't gonna be something like that for Bitcoin, at least, at least for things that really need to be important, trusted, you know, even between people that don't trust each other, that type of stuff. It just, to me feels like because it is a protocol, there is, there is so much potential for use cases down the road that we haven't even conceived of yet with maybe like layers that sit on top of Bitcoin. But we'll see, we'll see where it goes. But it's just, I think we're so early still

Vance Crowe [00:33:12] People when they talk about Bitcoin there, all the shit coins get involved and you get all this like, oh, we could do these crazy wild things, but then people start talking about things and you've even mentioned it, tokenization of like a commodity.

Chris Fisher [00:33:25] Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:33:25] I don't understand tokenization. If I wanna go out and buy barrels of oil, I can go out on the stock market and or, you know, in the commodities market and go do that. What, what then is a token if it's not just a digital commodity future or something?

Chris Fisher [00:33:40] Yeah, I think it's just a digital contract on a, on a physical item. And the details of course are gonna be in the accounting between the tracking of the physical token, the physical item, and the digital token. I, I am pretty skeptical of it because I think what it's really about is being able to move in and out of positions faster for the whales and dumping on retail, right? Putting this stuff in the Robinhood apps and all of these types of apps that make these things available. It's, you know, it's, it's to kind of make everything financialized and gambling and it's, it's right there in your app and you open it up and they got a big push notification, buy Exxon on the blockchain, you know, I think that's where it's going. And I, I think their benefits are, you know, automated accounting practices, intermediary, you know, trust, things like that that, you know, faster settling. I don't know if you've, if you've used stable coins much, but it is, it's a nicer experience in the sense that if you need to move money on the weekend, you can absolutely do it. And it's immediate. And the cash app has really nailed this experience where if you send stable coins to the Cash app, it just shows up as your cash balance. It's all integrated with the cash you already have in the app and the stable coins and you just spend them like regular cash. And I think that is useful for consumers and that's, that, that is a form of tokenization and they're tokenizing treasuries is what they're doing and they're, and they're making them a cash equivalent via a tokenization.

Vance Crowe [00:35:08] I've had to do some cross border payments. Somebody's gonna have me come up to Canada and doing their wire system is a pain in the ass and feels like we're still back in the eighties or something. It's been interesting to do it now, starting to use Bitcoin to make these transactions happen. Because once somebody, once a person's company comes online with Bitcoin, once they have access to an exchange and they can buy it and they can send it to me, they're like, oh my God, this was so much easier. We have all these payments all the time that go cross border. I had no idea Bitcoin would let you do this. And I'm like, it's

Chris Fisher [00:35:42] So great.

Vance Crowe [00:35:43] It's amazing, right? But you have to do it because if you don't actually touch the thing, it's all just too abstract to get your mind around. Yeah,

Chris Fisher [00:35:51] I think that does help. You know, there's a lot of really good apps. I really like the Zeus app, but I, it's, I was, when we were building the chicken coop, we had a contractor come out and, and frame it all out and he wanted to be paid that day and he wanted to be paid in cash. I was like, I don't, I don't have, you know, I don't have $500 or whatever it was in cash, just sitting like, gotta be so can I tell you about Bitcoin? He wasn't having it, but it just is like, come on, can we please not go back to the eighties? I could just send you this right now. I could zap it to your wallet. You could get a free wallet in 10 seconds. No, he wasn't having it. But I think as more people do that, they get their hands on it and they receive a payment and it comes in fast like that or whatever. It, it does sort of convince more and more people, oh, there's something to this, there's a use case here.

Vance Crowe [00:36:36] So I've gotten a chance to use Lightning, you know, I've got my strike app and my river app and just the different places I mess around with Lightning is, well first of all, how would you explain Lightning? And then do you think this is the end all be all second layer protocol, what do you think is gonna happen in the future?

Chris Fisher [00:36:52] I, I think of Lightning. This is, this is a rough one, but think of Lightning as maybe like the Visa network for the Bitcoin network. And I, okay, now I'm never gonna say that again.

Vance Crowe [00:37:01] I know that hurts my heart. I hate that. I don't like that all way.

Chris Fisher [00:37:04] It better, it's a, it's, what it really is, is it's peer-to-peer channels of a predefined set of SATs. So you can do transactions instantly and I are instantly, so traditionally the Bitcoin network has to settle and you have to wait for the blocks to clear and there's nine minutes there and you have to, you usually wanna wait for a couple of blocks and that can take a bit and that doesn't really work in a point of sales transaction. You don't have time, you don't have 10 minutes or whatever. So the Lightning Network was sort of designed to solve that problem. And so peers set up channels between each other and then you can just immediately send SATs across these channels. And it's a pretty robust network. It's tricky for, for new people to get set up and running. But we've been running ours for three years now. We run three lightning nodes and you know, every now and then we have to manage our channels or something like that. But it's pretty great and it allows for fantastic experience on both the sender and the receiver side. That feels magic because as soon as you hit that send button, the payment's received, it's just boom. And so that, that's the lighting network. It's what's called a layer two. And so it sits on top of Bitcoin, these channels, all of that, all of the finalization happens on the Bitcoin layer. That's all you really don't understand. Is it the all end all be all? I don't know. I I think it's, I I I feel like what it is is SMTP, which is the email standard that servers use to send an email between each other. You don't really think about it as an end user. You don't know that if you're sending from outlook.com to gmail.com that they're using an SMTP server to send it between the two systems.

Chris Fisher [00:38:36] You don't think about it. But SMTP is an open standard. It's I guess technically peer to peer, but it's just a backend implementation to move a message from one place to the other place successfully. And I sort of feel like that's how Lightning will be for end users. You know, you're, you may be sending something with the strike app, you're sending it to your wallet and it's going over lightning, but you don't really have to think about it very much. And there'll be other layer, there are other layer too, but there's, there'll be more that'll come along that maybe are a little bit different experience or maybe a little easier for people that want their own private setup. That's where Lightning can be a little tricky. There are apps out there like Breeze and Zeus that do make it really easy to just run your own lightning node. But the reality is it's still kind of tricky for most average folks to manage lightning on their own. And so it sort of has been biased towards custodial and, and companies that host the lightning for you. And so there's other things that are being worked on that I think have a lot of potential that are, are, are also Bitcoin adjacent like ASH and, and Arc. And, and those things I think have a lot of potential long term for families and small businesses and, and even little community banks and stuff like that. And they all kind of work together and Lightning often acts as a bridge between them as well. So yeah, it's a pretty, it's a pretty growing ecosystem.

Vance Crowe [00:39:51] Yeah. And this is another area that until you've messed around with Bitcoin, the idea of like getting to the abstraction of lightning is, is totally wobbly, but then you get to a place where you're like, I don't actually want to have a 10 minute or 20 minute or 30 minute settlement, but the systems I'm using, like using, I can't get albe to stay up for the life of me. Like if as soon as I leave it's, it's crashing down. I don't, I don't know. Is it, is it just 'cause these are small projects or these, you know, it is just 'cause it's early days. What do you think about instability?

Chris Fisher [00:40:23] I mean, I run an Albee hub, so I'm using their hosted service, but that thing's up all the time. So I, I don't know, but I do think that's what I was talking about there just a moment ago where it's lightning can be kind of challenging for people that just want their own small setup, their home setup. Like you gotta run a server and then if the server has problems, you know, like that just, and, and you gotta have something that's at home or on a VPS. That's what I don't love about Lightning. There are other things like Ash and like liquid that where you don't, you don't have to have channels and an always running server and and whatnot. But we're early still with that stuff. I mean the fact that you're even trying Albi is kind of, you're kind of more on then the, the cutting edge.

Vance Crowe [00:41:05] Oh, I've been there for two or three years. Yeah, but it's, but I mean I'm just, I think one of the things people can take away from me is like, I am a complete normie when it comes to computers. Like I have to be like, all right, how do I get my terminal open? Okay, let's do this. And AI makes it so much easier. Yeah. So you have a, a buddy sitting there willing to answer any question you have day or night. So when you think about the future of Bitcoin and how it will impact people, where is your mind at where, where do you think we will see adoption at first? Because the ETFs kind of gave people access to Bitcoin, but not really, really, it just said if you want in on some price action, get in on this, but you don't really know anything about it, you don't really get to use the system.

Chris Fisher [00:41:51] Yeah, I I kind of think that's more of that, right? Because what we have is, I think we have gone through first wave of early adopters and then we came along and now the companies that are gonna make products for the people that are not early adopters, and we're starting to see them iterate on this. There's a couple of new Bitcoin ETFs that are trying to hedge price action and guarantee a certain return. Like one of them is gonna be like, you'll never lose money on this ETF, right? They're trying these different angles. They're trying to come up with products. Honestly, I think products that appeal more to boomers and, and people that just wanna put money in an account and it just sort of accrues something that hopefully beats inflation. And so that I think is the next wave. And then it'll be, I think the, this, the third order wave is going to be, I suspect lending products, lending products will require a certain level of institutional adoption that brings kind of a bit more stability to the price action. And not that we won't still have volatility, but we won't necessarily have 70, 80% dips. We get maybe 50, 60% dips. Like we're kind of sitting around a 57% dip right now, which historically not so bad. We still have probably That's

Vance Crowe [00:43:05] Great. This has not been bad at all. This

Chris Fisher [00:43:07] Is like,

Vance Crowe [00:43:08] Welcome to Bitcoin land where the mountains are steep.

Chris Fisher [00:43:11] Like this is all you got. Now, to be fair, we shouldn't celebrate too much 'cause I could see it continuing to slide for the rest of the year. But I think, you know, that that type of stuff, when you have these consistent buyers when it's beyond just Bitcoin treasury companies and the ETFs, but it's the Schwabs and all these that are doing consistent buying for these products that may even out the price volatility a bit and once the price volatility, if it does even out a bit or they'll come up with another way with some other bag of tricks, I think lending's gonna be so massive because it is gotta be the best asset for collateral ever. Everybody can prove where it's at. It it depending on the, for let's just go steel man for the best case for the banks. There's lots of versions that are a lot better for the consumer, but the, the best version for the banks is they get to take your pristine provably scarce collateral and if you don't make a payment, they can liquidate you instantly and they can pay for it, right? It's to them, there's no guessing about the value of the property. There's no guessing about the state of it, about who holds it anything because it's all on chain, it's all provable. And they would in, in this setup, have access to it. And there's also, there's versions that are very pro-consumer and they'll be priced differently and they're experimenting with those right now where the consumer can still hold a key and still has a say in if the, if the asset gets liquidated and there's even others that are experimenting with you pay a higher fee, but there's no liquidation. They ride the volatility. A strike is working on that. And a new company that was just, that just announced yesterday is offering that product.

Vance Crowe [00:44:41] Wait, so they're saying E even if there's a huge price decline Yeah. They are not going to do some kind of margin call on you. They will, as long as you hold, what is it? Like probably four years or something like that, then they will hang with you. Yeah,

Chris Fisher [00:44:54] Yeah. They, they won't sell your Bitcoin. And then, and then another take on that is salt lending offers an emergency swap to stables. So if the price starts dropping like crazy, they can auto swap you to stables. That way you maintain the value of your threshold for your loan and then when the price starts to increase with your approval, they'll swap you back to Bitcoin. Not a bad, you know, there's different, there's different approaches. So I think, I think we're gonna see a lot of like these ETF products and these, you know, the financialization stuff that can go in the apps and that can be sold to the boomers where they can patch it up and make it a little safer. Kind of take some of the risk edge off. And then once we see some adoption there, I think lending is gonna be so huge as long as the market decides Bitcoin has a value, whatever that value is, it is a, i I cannot think of a better collateral asset at all.

Vance Crowe [00:45:42] Yeah. I'm on a, on the bank board for a, for an agricultural bank here in Missouri, and I mean, it's even better than land. Yeah. Because if you go get land, you actually have to be like, Hey, people on this land, go on, get off of here, get outta here. If you have cattle, you have to go pick those cattle up, you gotta take 'em to an auction, you gotta sell 'em. Yeah.

Chris Fisher [00:46:00] With

Vance Crowe [00:46:00] The Bitcoin you just, okay, you didn't like, you didn't do the terms. It's, it's ours now.

Chris Fisher [00:46:06] Yeah. And we didn't

Vance Crowe [00:46:07] Want that as a bank.

Chris Fisher [00:46:08] Some of them, you know, we'll give you 24 hours, some will give you 48 hours. They have different, they all will have different policies that will be competed out in the market, but it's still going to be the lowest risk loan possible for them that they do. It's, it's just gonna be great. So I think that's gonna be a huge market. And it may be that people get access to that without even realizing it. It could be that institutions are doing it on the backend at scale and they're providing liquidity to, to loan providers. I mean, there's a lot that's gonna happen there. Again, because, because it is getting adopted, institutionalized because it is a protocol, because it is scarce

Vance Crowe [00:46:42] And it gets adopted and the world gets better because we start having a situation where people can way lower their risk profile, right? I mean, the reason people have to shovel all, shovel all of their money into the s and p or index funds or whatever. Just like we were saying before, if 'cause you put in a savings account is not gonna live there very long, wouldn't it be so wonderful to live in a world where you could give a child, Hey, I earned this money and I want to give it to you and you don't have to do anything with it over time, just holding onto it, just having a low time preference

Chris Fisher [00:47:15] Will

Vance Crowe [00:47:15] Make it more valuable and we just don't live in that world now. No.

Chris Fisher [00:47:18] I, I want to do my job, I wanna work hard and I want to earn a fair living and I wanna save money and I want that to be enough. That's what I want. I don't wanna have to be an investing genius. And if I, if, if my retirement depended on the stock market right now, I'd be pretty nervous because things have been pumping pretty hard for a while and these IPOs, they're gonna take a lot of liquidity outta the market. It may, we may maybe we rip for two years afterwards or maybe we find ourselves in quite a slump in six months and if they do rip, well where do we find ourselves in 2030? Because if these AI companies x ai, andro and open ai, if each individually, they become the size of Microsoft. The only way that which is, is kind of what they're promising. The only way they could do that is by destroying jobs and by sucking the value out of all of the other companies in the s and p besides of maybe a couple. And that I would, I wouldn't wanna have bet my retirement on that either, especially if I'm retiring in the mid 2030s, late 2030s, early 2030s.

Vance Crowe [00:48:23] I mean, doesn't this, this hype around the AI companies, it feels like the same promotion that goes into the Grammys or the Academy Awards or the Super Bowl, right? It's like

Chris Fisher [00:48:35] The

Vance Crowe [00:48:35] Biggest event of the year. So much, so much hype and like, you know, even me, I just, this morning I was like exercising in my basement. I was like, I wonder if I should go, you know, am I making a generational mistake by not getting in on these IPOs? And you're like, no, you idiot. This is like this, this is exactly what the hype is all about. Right. Maybe it's, it's where people don't have any sense of what will it be worth. So it is all by

Chris Fisher [00:48:59] The rumor. Yeah. Perhaps the news throw on a, yeah. Yeah, I will. We'll see. I mean, they are very good tools. They are very useful and I do believe there's going to be a large sustained increase in demand. And I think we'll probably see a pretty healthy world of a lot of very powerful local models. But you'll still need that frontier level, premier intelligence on demand, it's intelligence on demand via an API. And that is so useful for a absolutely every aspect of

Vance Crowe [00:49:29] Business

Chris Fisher [00:49:30] From media production to tax preparation, right? So it's obviously gonna be big, but which it is really hard to know, and I don't like the uncertainty of it, but I do know that it's certain that we'll continue to print money. I do know it's certain that we're $40 trillion in debt and I do note certain there'll only be 21 million Bitcoin. Those are things I do certainly know. I don't know the rest.

Legacy Interviews client testimonial (ad segment) [00:49:52] Well, we'll come back and talk a little bit more about what you do know after a little plug for a service I offer called Legacy Interviews. I bought a legacy interview because when I was listening to the podcast and heard about it, I thought it was a great idea. And then my mom listened to your podcast and she said she wishes she had that for her grandmother. And I said, well, why don't we do that for you and dad? And she never considered it for them, but it just quickly became like a really good idea that they were excited about. My parents never in their life had such a long period of time where they spoke about themselves. At first they were uncomfortable with that, but then quickly became comfortable and just realized how much of themselves they could get out there in that period of time where they are the focus. My parents enjoyed the experience, particularly my dad. He kind of struggled through his life of thinking he wasn't successful, just didn't have the material wealth that he felt that he should have. And then as he was telling his story, talking about his family and his life as a whole, he realized that he had this extraordinary success, but he never really thought of it as success. There's this moment where his whole life, like it all made sense now. And here's a man that just turned 80 and it's all because they just sat down and spent a few hours talking about their lives with you. My mom was so grateful to have this on video, to really see their thoughts of their own life from start to finish.

Vance Crowe [00:51:25] And we've got that forever. So if you're interested in doing a legacy interview, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. Well, Chris, you have been doing your podcast, your total inspiration for me on several fronts, but one of the ones is that you are reliant completely on people sending you Bitcoin. Tell me about this model and how it's been working out for you.

Chris Fisher [00:51:51] So the value for value model is what it's called, and the idea is that if you get value from the show, you send some value back. And I like this model because I do this as a full-time business. And a business always orients itself to its most important customer. It's, it's how a business survives. And so in the, in the ad business, your most important customer is whoever your largest ad buyer is, or your largest two ad buyers or whatever it might be. If you're lucky, you've got three large ad buyers or something. And so you optimize to keep them happy because that's how the business survives. And you try to make the best content possible within those constraints. But with the value for value model, the audience becomes the largest customer. So the business s itself around making them happy. Well, how do you make your audience happy? You make the best show possible and you continue to invest in making the best show possible. You are responsive to their feedback and you incorporate what makes sense and adjust. And so what I try to convey to them is, if this is a podcast where we're talking about things like Bitcoin and money and the macro situation and stuff that maybe impacts the way you think about saving for the future, your or for your, for yourself or your business. Like you wanna know where my priorities lie. You wanna know that I'm not there to sell you a VPN or get you into one particular thing or the other. And I really think the best way to achieve that is with the value for value structure. I don't think it's impossible to do it the other ways. I think it is, but I think it's just inherently transparent. The other thing that I do for that reason for transparency is I read the totals in the show.

Chris Fisher [00:53:25] So everybody knows how much every episode makes. And there's some episodes we don't make a lot, and that can be a little embarrassing to go on air and be like, yeah, we made like $15 equivalent today and not very good day. But there's other days where we make a lot more, and that's part of just riding that wave. But that transparency, people know the health of the show. And so if the show starts getting decline in support, it's not gonna be a shock to them if the show wraps up either. 'cause they'll kind of seen it coming. That's just, it's a level of honesty and transparency that I think is very uncommon in the media space. You never, programs never sit down and say, this is how much money we made this episode. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. This is how many people supported us. We have 30 people. This podcast gets downloaded by, I dunno, 35,000 people this episode get downloaded by 35,000 people and we have 30 people support us. Right? And it really helps people understand the dynamics of it. And the, that transparency I think also encourages people to participate because they're like, oh boy, support's low. The guys need more than this. But also the value is a signal. So when we do an episode and we get a bunch of responses and a bunch of what we call boosts that come in, oh, that topic, that one resonated, we should do that topic again. Or Boy, we really messed that one up. Or nobody boosted that one. Nobody liked that episode. And it's a kind of signal that you don't get from downloads alone because a download's free, somebody can just let it sit there in their podcast catcher. They never have to listen to it. But a boost has value associated with it. They took their time, they had to interactively hit the button and send it to that message, to that episode.

Chris Fisher [00:54:56] So they're a lot more engaged. So that signal is a lot higher. It's a lot higher of a signal. And so it's a great source of health metrics for the show as well.

Vance Crowe [00:55:06] I mean, I think people want to, you know, I used to work in public radio. I was a membership coordinator, so I was the guy that if you called in your subscription of 40 bucks a month, I was gonna mail you that tote bag. Right? And there's a funny thing, like I, when I first started, I was like, who would do this? Who in their right mind would send money pledge money to a radio show that you could get for free? And what you find out is a lot of people wanted to do it, and then you get into some weird spaces in public radio for like, you're not actually supporting that specific show. You're supporting the overall station and they're purchasing these things. So to me, this value for value is exactly what everyone wants. But before Bitcoin or really before Lightning, you, you couldn't do it because if you were gonna try and send $2 or $5 or $10 per episode to a person, the credit card fees alone would just eat you alive. Yeah. You know, because that Visa is going to get at least $2 off of your transaction, whether that's $2 out of a hundred or it's actually be more than that. Or if it's $2 out of a $2 transaction and Bitcoin now makes it so the transaction cost makes it so I can do a ton of small ones, which means you could subscribe for exactly what you want.

Chris Fisher [00:56:22] Yeah. And one of the concepts that comes along with that is the ability to just stream SATs as you listen. So you just set a threshold, I'll send a hundred SATs every minute, and it just in the background as you're listening, it just stream SATs to the podcast, the creator. That's pretty great. And the other thing that's really nice is because it's Lightning and it's Bitcoin and it's digital, you can do something called splits. So right there in the RSS feed, totally transparent for our listeners to review, you can see where the funds go. You can see that each of the hosts in our case gets like a 30% split or something. And you can see like our on, on some of our shows, the editor gets a cut, or this podcast app developer, we, we give a little split to, or maybe sometimes a guest that comes on the show that's a real good contributor, we, and, and has a lightning address. We can, we can put their lightning wallet in the splits and so it'll automatically divvy up the money and send it to the individual wallets. With finality no longer is it like every quarter in the back office, we're bringing up the spreadsheet, okay, we gotta send this much to this host and this much to that host. And you know, like the, and, and the co-hosts just have to hope that we do the accounting right and that we're honorable and give them the amount they earned and all of that. And the audience has zero insight into any of it. They don't know what any of the arrangements are. But with the value for value system, with the value block and the boost, it's all right there. You can see what everybody gets. It's, it's super great. And because it automatically handles the splits, it's less work for me on the backend.

Vance Crowe [00:57:49] Yeah. I mean, I, it, to me, it's a brave thing. And I think so many, what you find out when you, the value for value model comes out is that many, many people are producing a show because the advertiser likes the messages that are going out there. And that's entirely why that show exists.

Chris Fisher [00:58:07] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:58:07] And if that, it, it, it really takes it away from being a propaganda model in, in a lot of ways. Like, it, it is a really wholesome, dramatic way for me. I don't do, I only advertise the stuff that I'm working on, so I've gotten away from that. But the, the slavish devotion you have to have to your advertisers. I mean, in the ag world, you can see it in the podcast, you know, somebody gets sponsored by John Deere, all of a sudden they're going to John Deere conferences and John Deere hats, and suddenly there's never a story about the problem with John Deere's electronic equipment. And you know, like that's what, that's what shapes the narrative about what people are thinking about John Deere if you're in that tribe.

Chris Fisher [00:58:46] Yeah. And it just eats away at credibility is people figure it out. And I think that's all we really have is credibility in this space. We don't have, we don't have a bunch of advertising and all that telling you we're credible like everybody else does in mainstream. And I just don't understand why people flesh it. I think they just think people won't notice that they're gonna outsmart everybody or something like that. And there's, there's the secondary problem. Advertising requires that you get some clicks, you have to have people use the promo code. You kind of need to get people to see your video, whatever it is. So it, it also means you need to lean in to feeding the algorithm because if you want more people clicking for your sponsor so that way you get paid more, then you better make sure you get reach. And if you're gonna get reach, you gotta go make a stupid face and a thumbnail and put yourself up on TikTok and YouTube and things like that and x and all these, and play the algorithm games to get yourself noticed and to have these extreme takes that lead to audience capture and all of these second and third order effects. And it all really stems from just trying to get more views and more downloads for your show so that way you can sell more ads and make more money. Right? Like it's, it's these incentives that line up that kind of over time they dease the creator and de base the show. Now, it's not impossible, it doesn't happen to everybody. It's, I'm not saying this is a universal thing, but man, just, you look at so much of the content online and it's clearly a problem.

Vance Crowe [01:00:13] I mean, I think, right, like the debasing the creator is exactly correct. 'cause what happens, so on XI don't really put out political ideas. I mean, I'm not against it, I just, I just don't really, and the other day I put something out or I commented on a political thing and I got hundreds of interactions, right? And a lot of 'em are positive, some of them are negative. But what was interesting was like immediately my mind went to like, oh, what was different about this one than, oh, I just had an, an opinion on a political topic. Why don't I do that again? And I could kick it up again. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Suddenly your brain gets hijacked by what does the mob want this faceless group? Yeah. And that's even without

Chris Fisher [01:00:53] A large financial incentive, if you had a large financial incentive to grow and grow and get more clicks. And it's, it's a really, I think it's human nature to just sort of eventually lean into it.

Vance Crowe [01:01:03] Your show production quality is astounding to me. It is. Of the quality of like a full-time, you know, drive, show, radio host with clips and all of this. How do you do it

Chris Fisher [01:01:17] Practice? I hate to, I hate that to be the answer because it really is true. I do it live to tape and I, when I'm done, I hit the button and I publish it. I don't edit, I don't, I do run a facts and process it a bit. So over the years I have, I've built up processes and workflows. I think that enable that. A lot of it goes into the prep. All of, I'd say the bulk of the work goes into the prep of the show. And then, so by the time I'm ready to sit down, I've got the whole show in my head and I know all the clips, I have 'em all lined up, I've watched them, right? I, I have it all. So it's all in the, you know, the head context. So that helps. And then I have added controls with things like stream decks and soundboards. So I can do camera switching and recording and drop markers and fire off soundboards and stuff like that, just sort of by pushing buttons here in the central control. And that's kind of it. And then I, I, you know, I, over time I've just developed a technique with, I like it when, when I use the compressor in this way and the limiter this way. And I, like I said in my EQ this way, and you know, just those things of tastes that I've developed over time that I then run the audio through that before I publish it.

Vance Crowe [01:02:27] I, I mean, another big part of it is that you actually find clips that I have not heard. Right. You know, and there's a, there's some of the clips that are just the general melu, Hey, this is what's being talked about in the world right now. But you do a lot of stuff that's like deep inside the belly of cspan. I cut out this one guy talking about this, you know, bill that nobody else cares about. How in the world do you locate all of that?

Chris Fisher [01:02:51] I, I do have a DVR that records a lot of the, like the Bloomberg and the, and the CNBC and the Fox business and YouTube TV also has a, a live financial stream. Bloomberg has like four of them. And so I do have those. And then I have an agent. Now I didn't used to have this that transcribes and sort of flags things for me in the morning and report. So that's been really useful. But that's only been within the, in the like last couple of months. It's really every day, every day I'm working on clips for that show. And every day I sit down and I go through the dues. I go and I find stuff and I what, but I don't do the full process. I have a system where I tag, okay, this, this, this, I'm taking this, this is the theme and I'm tagging it throughout the week. So that way when I sit down, I get in, I get into the studio really early Wednesday morning, like, you know, 5:36 AM and then with the help of my agent, I kind of process all the clips, I normalize them, transcribe them, sort them. And then I kind of sit down and I've been working on, you know, by observing the news every single day, I'm kind of working on a thesis throughout the week. So then when I sit down, I kind of try to try to get that put into a, a structure in clips. And a lot of times I'm trying to think about it from, okay, well if my main point is gonna be, you know, whatever it is, C here, then I need to tell A and B to make C understandable, right? So we need to get through A and B to kind of set up the situation to understand the conditions and then C makes a little bit more sense. So I kind of think of it in that way as like how to tell a structure where maybe you're not following this exact story. So I'm gonna back up a couple of levels, kind of tell you a little bit of what you need to know then to really understand that.

Chris Fisher [01:04:26] And that's sort of the way I just sort of think through it. And then what I've developed more recently is a full clip sheet player that then goes through all my notes and develops a clip player. And then I can just sit here and toggle through the clips as I do my talk. And I just sit here and fire off the clip and I then I talk and I boom and fire off the next clip. And then, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:04:46] And when you're hitting, so you're in motioning like things like this, like do you have like a road caster where you've just got an actual physical button that can do that?

Chris Fisher [01:04:53] So next to me, I have a couple of stream decks, El gado stream decks, and I have them loaded up. And then over to my other side, I have a whole other set of soundboards and effects that I can do that are more like my static always persistent stuff. So I've got like two categories and then I've, and then one of the things I've done is with automation, if I go to play a clip, the camera automatically switches now to the camera clip. And if I hit my camera back button to return to me, it automatically pauses the clip. You know, just little things like that just to reduce friction that usually take me a couple of weeks to sort out. But by the time I have it sorted out, it just makes the show a little bit smoother to produce live. 'cause my main goal is not to edit. I don't want to edit.

Vance Crowe [01:05:38] Me too, you

Chris Fisher [01:05:38] Know,

Vance Crowe [01:05:39] I know I'm going, I actually had a production meeting this morning. Like, that's all I wanna do

Chris Fisher [01:05:44] Is

Vance Crowe [01:05:44] I just wanna do the content.

Chris Fisher [01:05:45] Yep.

Vance Crowe [01:05:45] Have the content be right and then be done. Right. Yeah. And like I'm totally with you on not feeding the algorithms. I, there was a time in my life probably around COVID where, where my podcast was getting into this groove of the algorithms, and then I did some questionable COVID podcasts and it was just evaporated. And then the only people that were listening to me were people that were diehards. And then I was like, oh, the diehards, they didn't, they didn't care about all this like gamifying, like, how do I get that exact right title? I'm gonna put it all in caps about how, you know, rip this person apart. So it's a freedom when you're not stuck to the algorithms.

Chris Fisher [01:06:23] I had a really early experience, maybe even before people really caring about YouTube, but when Apple Podcast launched a little while later, I had a, I had a podcast called Coder Radio and it was focused at developers and Apple was featuring us in the technology section up on their banners. And our show was taking off and we were delighted because we talked quite a bit about Apple. And you know, we thought that was pretty exciting that Apple was featuring us. And so we made it about two weeks or a week, I can't remember exactly, it might've only been a week. And in our next episode it was our ww DC episode and we were very critical of Apple. And they pulled down all of the featuring and never featured us never

Vance Crowe [01:07:06] Again. We

Chris Fisher [01:07:07] Immediately weren't punished for that. And I was like, oh, of course, of course I learned that one the hard way pretty quick. 'cause that was so long ago. And it's true today. Like you, like you say, you do the wrong thing and all of a sudden your channel no longer gets featured or you don't release it the right cadence or, or people don't share it enough or whatever it is. And you can have a channel that's been successful for two, three years. I watched this happen and I've talked to guys that are just absolutely destroyed by it. And then something changes in what they're heating on YouTube and their channel stops getting suggested and their channel collapses.

Vance Crowe [01:07:44] I mean, it's a wild thing. You know, people imagine, oh, someday we might be controlled by the ai. And I'm like, well, kind of already are. Right? Like what your selection itself, what, what's available to it? What are you paying attention to these days? What is on your mind for, hey, this, this is where things are headed.

Chris Fisher [01:08:03] I mean, I can't help but pay a bit of attention to where all these big tech AI IPOs are going, just because I don't think we've ever seen anything like this. And I don't know what's on the other side of it. So that, that does have a bit of my attention at the moment. You know, I keep trying to bring it back to the chickens, but that is something that just, where does this lead? And then you combine that with an election year and you combine that with the Bitcoin four year cycle that some people say is real, some people say they don't. But all of it really, I think is it's just creating a very special economic situation. And I, I, I really often kind of have a hunch of where things are going, but I couldn't tell you right now. So I find that to be really fascinating.

Vance Crowe [01:08:41] Your knowledge of economic topics is, is quite impressive to me. It, I think most of the time when you've got somebody that can break these things down, they do not, it's not coupled with somebody that has the production capability or you clearly have enough knowledge of Linux to be able to talk about that in depth to your tribe. Where did you develop this ease with which you can talk about financial stuff?

Chris Fisher [01:09:06] Yeah, it was really after the 2008 financial collapse because that I was so financially illiterate that I, I just didn't understand how anything worked. And so it has been a process and I, I feel like it's still so much to learn, but it has been a process of learning these complicated things and then learning them well enough to explain them simply in a way where it doesn't bog the show down for five minutes while I explain how money printing works or something like that. Right. So it's been a, it's been a process of understanding it myself to, to just try to, you know, I run a business, I've got three kids, I, I, I just want to, I just wanna be aware of what's going on. And then that turned into a further and deeper understanding. And then I had a great opportunity to learn from my friend the Bitcoin dad, who is, was a classically trained economist who discovered Bitcoin, and he kind of blown his mind. And so to learn so much of the classical economic stuff from him directly for a couple of years was extremely beneficial to really kind of hone my understanding. And he's just, he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

Vance Crowe [01:10:08] My my buddy Rob Long always talks about how, you know, the, the Austrian would like to think that the Austrian economic school of thought led everybody to Bitcoin, but it's actually the reverse.

Chris Fisher [01:10:20] I think so, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:10:21] It's that it's Bitcoin. You get into Bitcoin, you're like, this is kind of cool. And then you're like, oh, this is a different way of thinking. And then you're like, oh, surprise, there's, there's this way of thinking about this Ludwig von Mises. And so you, you discover the philosophy through the technical experience of Bitcoin. Was that

Chris Fisher [01:10:38] True for

Vance Crowe [01:10:38] You? Yes.

Chris Fisher [01:10:38] Oh, and I, I don't know how else I would've figured out the traditional financial system without a teacher like Bitcoin, because it was, you needed something that was almost the polar opposite to be able to recognize what you've been living in, in your whole time. I was like, I didn't realize I was a fish in water. Right. I, I didn't realize that, but I've been swimming in the wa and so I didn't understand the nature of the water and any of it, how it worked, but having Bitcoin to look at was this, this mere reflection. And through that, I, I really, really started to understand how everything else worked. And, and then obviously just sort of of, I think, developed the interest as well. I think Bitcoin helped me develop that interest and, and kind of that carry and stoke that curiosity. And without that, I don't know if I ever would've connected the dots. I don't know how else I would've gotten there.

Vance Crowe [01:11:27] Yeah. I I think you're right about needing that kind of thing to, to show what's there, you know, and so I, one time I used to work at the World Bank and I got a chance to have lunch with the former lead economist. And I was young, like just outta grad school, maybe not that young, but I was like really naive to what I was asking. And I was like, Hey, I've been thinking about it. Why aren't we on a gold standard now? Keep in mind this is like 2010 maybe. Yeah, 2010, you know, why aren't we on a gold standard? And him being like, yeah, you, you fool, we, we couldn't possibly not expand the money supply because then think about what would happen to prices and what people would do with their money. They would save it and they would instead of investing it, and then we wouldn't have these advancements. And at the time I had no like, backup against that. So I was like, all right, well, I talked to John, John told me that, you know, the economy can't grow if we don't have that. And oh God forbid people save their money, that would be bad. And until you have Bitcoin, you can't even have that philosophically, at least I couldn't.

Chris Fisher [01:12:32] I mean, I remember hearing what felt like my entire life, you know, you want about a 2% inflation rate, you know, you want something around 2%, you know, if that way the economy grows, that is such a load. And then you, if you look into the etymology of the 2%, it's just something that kind of came up with some kind of like Norway or something just, I can't remember, the country just kind of came up with, and then they're all 2% sounds good because it lets them, you know, dBase and steal a little bit. It's essentially a silent tax and people don't really notice 2%, but if you add that up, it compounds, add it up over 20 years, over 30 years, 2% becomes a lot. And so it's the funniest thing. Oh yeah. A little 2%. And it

Vance Crowe [01:13:13] Wasn't, it's just like, it's the six feet space rule, right? Yeah. Like, oh, oh, you know, what we should do is have six feet between you and then you'll be fine. And you're right about that 2%. And in addition to that, like, because it's a fish inside of water, you can only tell 2% is is, you know, like what they told you it was. Yeah.

Chris Fisher [01:13:33] Like

Vance Crowe [01:13:34] If you actually go measure things, nothing only inflated at 2%, maybe TVs, which actually should be going down in price. But everything raises vastly more than that.

Chris Fisher [01:13:44] You know, going back to our point earlier about the boomers is they got to live in a time where things were, we were debasing the currency, but things were getting cheaper because of exports and, and technological evolution. I mean, look at a computer got insanely cheap over the last 20 years for, for really what they can do. And I think we're kind of at the end of that run. You know, we've, we've kind of milked the max efficiency, we can milk out of that and we kind of max that out now. And so stuff is just getting more expensive, but the quality isn't getting any better. And that's where we're at now. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:14:16] I thought of a thing and we will see where your economic mind takes this. So in addition to the fact that prices are gonna go up, because energy's going up and that's such a fundamental part of prices, but because we are trying to pull so much expense into the, the present, right? You gotta buy these processors right now, and in, in 36 months, the processors for that AI is going to just disappear. It's funny what this is doing to all of the dollars, right? Sucking them forward into right now in hopes that Grok or chat, GPT or Anthropic is going to explode in their prices. What if they don't, what what

Chris Fisher [01:14:56] Will

Vance Crowe [01:14:57] Actually, because we are writing everything on it, this is like putting everything on black or something.

Chris Fisher [01:15:02] It is this, that's why it just, it fascinates me so much it fascinat and then to do it during a midterm election cycle as well. And so if it blows up, it'll be the biggest political issue of the election, right? It'll be an absolute devastating blow and it will, it could potentially turn AI into a ginormous p public boogeyman. It's already primed for it. So it's, it's, it's a hell of a gamble.

Vance Crowe [01:15:29] What do people think about AI centers where you're at data centers, these kinds of things? Are they pushing back on 'em?

Chris Fisher [01:15:35] You know, it's an interesting mix. It's a real interesting mix. I feel like there's a lot of anti anti-D data center stuff in downtown Seattle. In fact, the city just passed an ordinance banning all data centers for the next year on in the city limits. But then when I talk to like friends and family members, they're all using it. And when I talk to my friend who owns a small business in town here, he's using it to like help improve the menus for his restaurant and generate stuff for his, for the like little displays and stuff like that. My wife owns a clinic, she uses it to display infographs in her clinic and create little like, you know, displays of like, this is what this charge is and stuff like that. You know, just things that they can generate that she, she never was gonna get Photoshop and she was never gonna hire a graphic designer to do that. So they're use. So it's an interesting mix of people are definitely using it and people are definitely freaking out about it.

Vance Crowe [01:16:32] It's a weird, so, you know, when I worked for Monsanto, my job was to talk with people about GMOs and pesticides and people on their face would be like, I hate those things. I don't want them. And then, you know, like when you would dig into it, you'd be like, well you are using them right now and, and you could go back and forth on whether or not you want people want GMOs or which pesticides, but like it is the state of play. Our, our system would radically change if you reverse course on that. And it seems very similar to the AI pushback that people have. Yeah,

Chris Fisher [01:17:03] That's a very interesting insight. I can totally see those parallels and, and people want the benefits of GMO food, but if you ask them directly, oh no, I, I don't want to eat GMO food. Yeah. But they want all the benefits and they want people to have the food supply and the prices to be what they are. And you

Vance Crowe [01:17:19] Don't want worms in your apple and you don't want bruises and like all of those things. So right now in the Bitcoin tribe, right, there's people trying, I don't know, I, to me the price is almost immaterial. It's like funny to me or you know, fun buying time, like whatever we've done, 80% drawdowns. I've been in this game for more than yeah. For a while. So to me, like it's what's the new information? There's very little going on or, so it seems, and then there's always this talk about Senator Lummis and the Clarity Act and all of these laws. Is this gonna have an impact on Bitcoin?

Chris Fisher [01:17:54] I don't know much I think other than it gives the large whale institutions just the kind of hall pass to participate more in this space. And Bitcoin will probably benefit from that to a degree, but there's really almost nothing in the actual Clarity act for Bitcoin. It, the Clarity Act, I, this is my personal view, but I think the Clarity Act is really about just entrenching stable coins and tokenization mostly so that way the US government has another regular buyer of treasuries so they can issue more of them and they have somebody to buy them IE the stablecoin issuers. And if the banks can become stablecoin issuers, and if certain tech companies can become stablecoin issuers and you've got Circle and you've got Tether, they all become big customers. And I think that's the real urgency behind the Clarity Act. I don't know if it's gonna make it, because what doesn't get talked about a lot, but is a huge issue is there is an ethical provision that is being debated. And the goal of that ethics provision is to essentially eliminate the type of crypto trading that you're seeing in the Trump family. And it really is targeted at, at Trump and you know, probably other politicians as a, as a side effect. And so they are, they're lining up on political lines to, to either fight for that or to defend against that. And there are I think 16 days left technically where they're gonna be in session to get it passed before we really get into the summer break. And in the midterms,

Vance Crowe [01:19:22] Do you think Jamie Dimon and what's his name, Chris? Is it Anderson, the guy from Coinbase? Is their fight, is that just Kfab? Is that just like WE wrestling to try and make it seem like there's two sides here and we're having contention?

Chris Fisher [01:19:35] I've been wondering about that. I don't, I don't think so. I think there's something to it, but I don't think what Jamie Dimon is arguing about is the it, you know, I think there's something else. Maybe it's, maybe I, you know, you have to be deeper in the, in the, in the banking world to understand it. I, I'm sure they're concerned about people holding stable coins on Coinbase and earning, you know, a 3% yield when they're only gonna pay you a 0.5% yield. I'm sure that's a mild concern, but let's be real, you and I know this, most people, especially boomers who have the money, they're not gonna pick up their wealth and move it over to Coinbase for a Coinbase 3%. They're, they're just not doing that. And, and JP Morgan already offers them products in money market accounts that offer higher yields in that. Anyways, so I don't think that's the real conflict. And then what Jamie says in interviews is it's about the all of the fraud protection and the terrorism protection stuff, the A ML and all that, but, and the money laundering, but all that's in there, in fact all of that's turned up to 11 in the Clarity Act. The Clarity Act really gives them incredibly deeper financial surveillance powers over traditional cryptos besides Bitcoin. And so I don't really think it's about that either, but he's clearly angry. I mean, he's dropping SBOs on Fox Business.

Vance Crowe [01:20:52] Yeah, that's what made it to me. That's what made it be like, Hey, let's go make this newsworthy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna drop, you know, and he

Chris Fisher [01:20:58] Was going directly after Coinbase too.

Vance Crowe [01:21:00] Yeah. So I didn't, to me it feels like Kfab, but I also, you know what, what do I know? It's hard

Chris Fisher [01:21:06] To say.

Vance Crowe [01:21:06] I, I think like he's in the position where he's Fiat King and he's king of the boomers that are not Yeah. Not interested in this. And you know, I think that we have that line of, you get the Bitcoin at the price you deserve, but also people only find Bitcoin when they need it. And like, I needed it at a certain time in my life. I still do, but like when you're at the top of of Fiat Mountain, you don't really need it. Yeah.

Chris Fisher [01:21:30] There's not a market fit. It really, it's a product where there needs to be a market fit. And I don't think he's there. And you know, I do think he's serious too, because his puppet, Elizabeth Warren gave it her best at the, at the Clarity Committee hearing. She really tried. She said twice it was gonna crash the economy. And I mean, she really tried hard to stop that thing the best. She couldn't, you know, she's always worked hand in glove with Jamie Dimon. So it does seem like there's, there's a real conflict there and it's, it's this wild clash of a very classic quiet power in US politics, which is the banks. And if this goes through, if I were the banks, I'd wanna punish the Republicans for it, possibly. I don't know.

Vance Crowe [01:22:16] Yeah. I mean if you, if they feel like they're giving up some serious power, I mean, I, I think the, it's the financial industrial complex as Simon Dixon says. I think that's a real thing.

Chris Fisher [01:22:27] And

Vance Crowe [01:22:28] If they're getting some of their power eroded by, you know, they love it. They're at the, they're at the beginning of the trough, the cantilever effect is the, is the biggest right by them. And man, what a, what a wild time to be around

Chris Fisher [01:22:41] It. It is an interesting, and it's like, I would think as a politician, the two powers you don't wanna upset is the intelligence industrial complex and the banking industrial complex probably in, in the military too. But we'll see what happens. So I'm, I'm, I give it pretty low odds of passing. I do think it would be a semi net positive thing for Bitcoin, but only a only semi net.

Vance Crowe [01:23:01] So to round out, I, I don't really, really like asking people future price prediction questions, but I'd be curious, what is a good replacement for that question? What should you ask somebody to get their, their gauge on where is Bitcoin going?

Chris Fisher [01:23:15] Hmm hmm. I like to think of it as a four to 10 year asset, right? If you get it, you should probably plan for four to 10 years. And if you are disappointed with the price performance before four years, then you don't really understand what you hold. So I like to, I've been recently asking people, what do you think it's gonna be at 2032? And the other question I ask with that is, if it's over a million dollars, will a million dollars even mean what it does today? Will it matter if we get to a million dollars in 2032? Will it matter? I've been pondering that question recently.

Vance Crowe [01:23:46] Yeah. I definitely feel like the straight up price comparison won't, won't mean anything because yeah, we are going to keep burning at a, an ever higher rate. We're gonna just keep pumping more money into the system. So yeah, it's probably, you know, one of the things I do on a podcast called the Ag tribes report, I compare a, an acre of land in Bitcoin and that has been very powerful. I mean, lately it's been quite a lot of lower. Yeah.

Chris Fisher [01:24:10] But you

Vance Crowe [01:24:10] Know, when we were doing the runup in February, there's, you know, there were a lot of times when like that could buy you quite a few acres of land in Nebraska or Iowa or wherever.

Chris Fisher [01:24:20] That is a very good metric. I often will look at gold and a barrel of oil as well, which, you know, it sometimes does better, sometimes it does worse. The fiat isn't the right measurement. And I also wonder in 2030 ish, in 2032, if we have this adoption from the banks and, and we have this market fit that develops because of the continued debasement of the currency, then it would be more likely that that scenario with my contractor building the chicken coop, they may at that point just take Bitcoin directly. And then we're just saying, what do you want for this? You want 500,000 SATs for this? What do, what do you feel is fair? You know? And that may be the way we price things in the future.

Vance Crowe [01:24:56] Well, Chris, this has been a great honor. I'm so excited that you came on. Tell people where they can find you if they want to hear your show, which I, I will just put out there is literally the best Bitcoin show out there.

Chris Fisher [01:25:09] Well that's, that's very thank you this week in Bitcoin dot show or jupiter broadcasting.com, that's where you'll find it.

Vance Crowe [01:25:16] Alright man, thank you so much for coming on and I'll have you back again if you'll ever stop by.

Chris Fisher [01:25:21] Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:25:23] Alright, that's gonna do it for our show today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Many of you know, I've been quite busy. We have a course coming up here that I've developed over the last, I don't know, 20 years of a career called interest-based Communicating. This is where I teach how to do interest-based negotiating, how to tell your story about what you care about in a way that keeps people engaged, how to have deeper conversations, how to resolve conflicts, and even how to present to audiences in ways that make them understand what you're saying and what you want them to change. So if you are interested in taking that class, go to Articulate Ventures slash IBC and maybe you can come to our class right here, July 6th through the eighth. It's, we're coming down to the wire on signup, so if you're interested, do that now. All right. We'll be back again once we found another really interesting person to chat with. My name is Heath Hunter. I'm a managing director at Broadview Group in our business. Your success is dependent on how you're able to effectively tell your story to relate to your customer or your potential partners. And we needed a course that could train our staff on how to do that. I was looking for something much less than what Vance delivered. I literally just wanted him to come in and help us a little bit with storytelling. And he came back with this curriculum, which was awesome. How to craft a memorable introduction, build a story around our firm and how we personally weave into that story.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:26:55] How do we continue the conversation through asking good questions, how to negotiate in a collaborative way versus a competitive way so that we maintain that relationship that we've worked so hard to build. Our relationships are everything. To me, interspace communication is really understanding the perspectives and the point of view of others being able to meet them where they are. Interest-Based Communication to me is creating a dialogue with someone else sitting across the table from you. It allows each party to really describe what they care about and work together to accomplish that for each party. A lot of people, myself included before I took Vince's class, really went in with higher weight on what was important to me. Everybody has a tendency to just focus in on the price, but there are hundreds of other components that come into something as complex as a transaction for a company. What are they actually interested in? What do they hope to achieve and what does success look like for them walking out of a negotiation? Those could differ widely from how they're showing up. If we can somehow get on the same page, you can create these collaborative solutions that are a win for everyone, we've definitely woven that into the process. We're trying to ask those deep probing questions on what are their motivations, what do they care about? Really understanding who they are, introducing yourself to better communicate who you are and your background. What makes a good introduction? This is something that I, I really appreciated and I've been in the workforce for, you know, 27 plus years and done lots of introductions.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:28:33] I've heard lots of introductions, making a good introduction. I think everyone just assumes that you should just kind of start talking about yourself and go into your title and what you do. And frankly, that's typically not very memorable or interesting. Going through this course and learning about storytelling and the arc of a story and how to embed that in your introduction was honestly like nothing I'd ever heard before. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you're a good storyteller, you tend to sort of capture an audience and you want to be able to do that with your introduction, sort of that hook that you need in, in a story. For me, the big thing was having faith that sitting back and really paying attention to the conversation will help draw out a connection before I would spend my time trying to, okay, what do I have in common with this person? Oh yeah, this is a chance to interject and, and establish that link. Ironically, just kind of stepping back and saying, I'm just gonna really pay attention to what's in front of me. It really has impacted the conversation because you can get deeper faster. I used to think it was all about how interesting I could come across, but what I've learned, and honestly what Vance taught us, the most interesting folks that you run across, ask really good questions. That's been a game changer for me. Instead of trying to focus on myself, focusing fully on the other person and really just listening for like, what are the details that they're giving me, because there's a reason that they mention that. We assume that folks can kind of see what we see in our heads.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:30:04] And what this course taught us about diagramming your ideas is to put it on paper, put it out there so the other parties can see it. We were meeting with a group that week and we were trying to communicate different ideas and outline a vision for this potential business. Instead of doing it in a PowerPoint format, we did it on a whiteboard. It was transformational. The CEO he, he just lit up. We actually handed the pen over to him. We said, Hey, show us where we've got it wrong. Show us where you have additional ideas. The level of engagement, you know, went through the roof and he got up and you could see he was almost giddy. Having that limiter of the speed of your hand, you're bringing them along in, you know, your idea you're trying to convey. So the practicality of the course, the mirroring, the diagramming, the exercises. I think that's one of the things that I appreciated most about the course. Super candidly, I've been through a lot of these in my career and you walk out of there and you're like, well that was a waste of time. What I can tell you about what Vance brought to the table. I, at no point ever felt that way. I was able to walk out of every single session and put to work immediately what we had practiced that day. He has a great way of connecting concepts so that you have this, you know, holistic framework, so to speak, to connect with people, which is something that we do all the time. But deliberate practice of it really helped up my game. I would recommend that everyone take this course and I would venture to say that this has been more impactful for me at home than at work. Pretty much everybody is having conversations and negotiations at home. I feel super lucky and blessed that we were able to have this course at work and that it sort of bleeds into home life.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:31:43] I think that's kind of the best of both worlds. Any corporation or any firm, no matter what the size I think would benefit from something like this, who I'd recommend this to, is a small group of professionals who are really dedicated to self-improvement. Interest-Based Communication to me is a holistic way to

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:32:02] Build relationships. Can benefit anyone.