Become a sovereign individual with Foundation devices. Bitcoin, FOSS

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with Zach, the CEO of Foundation Devices. It's been about six months since we last spoke, and since then I've actually managed to get one of these passports in my hand.

It is really, really nice. We go into obviously the design and everything about it. In this episode, I won't blab on too much here. I always enjoy chatting to Zach, and I hope you enjoy listening.

I'm really looking forward to getting him on the show again and seeing what Foundation do next. I hope you enjoy the show, and if anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out. Enjoy.

Zach, welcome back. Thank you, Max. How's it going? Yeah, really, really well. I've been looking forward to this one. I was just actually listening back to our last conversation. It reminded me, yeah.

It broke my memory of some of the stuff we were talking about, so it was an exciting one. We covered a lot of ground on the last one, and wow, the world has fucking changed a bit since we spoke.

So, yeah, just a bit. Thank you. I'm embarrassed to admit that I was listening to it a bit, too, so that I wouldn't be responsible. And so, you probably listen to yourself all the time, but, like, you know, I'm not used to hearing myself play back.

It's pretty grating, to be honest, because I have to do a fair amount, and it never gets easier, no matter how much you listen to your own voice, you never go, "Oh, I sound awesome." That never happens.

You always think, "Oh, fucking hell, why'd I say that?" Or, "Oh, listen to this," or, "Oh, God, look." There's my voice, but, yeah, no, I really enjoyed that one. It was really good, and one big thing that has changed since that conversation is I literally, in my hands now, have a foundation devices passport, and it's fucking beautiful.

I mean, I've said this to you offline, but, wow, you've knocked it out of the apartment. It's really, really nice, and it was all just theory when we last spoke. It's better than I expected.

It's weighty, it's got that Apple feel. It's really easy to use, even a fuckwit like me can do it, and, yeah, just well done, really, really good. - Well, thank you for that. I mean, it's really nice to hear that, seriously.

You know, you work on something for a long time, and then, if you're a creator, and I'm sure you feel this exact thing about your podcast, and I'm sure everyone who makes something, you know, feels the same way, you're never, like, satisfied with it, you know?

You're always, you're your own biggest critic, right? You're, like, I look at it, and I'm like, there's so many things that we need to do to improve it. (laughs) And, and, yeah, but I really appreciate you saying that.

It's tough because going on podcast months before we ship something, it's like, what does that look like for my credibility, for the company's credibility, if we don't ship something, right?

Or if it doesn't, if it doesn't do what we say, it's gonna do. Really excited and really proud of the team that we're able to get it out. - So, can you talk me through, like, you know, from six months ago when it was not out, not in production, what were those six months like, trying to get it to a stage where it's ready

and a finished product? Were there curve balls that you weren't expecting? - Yeah. (laughs) - Yeah, any that you can share or? - Oh, yeah, definitely. And, yeah, I mean, the main thing was that we had a lot of issue with this plastic supplier.

And it's so funny 'cause, like, you think that plastic is gonna be the easy part, and we thought that, you know, there's so many other things that could go wrong, you know, on the firmware side, on the electronic side, you know, the circuit board, or, you know, what happens if something goes wrong

in terms of, you know, the components and, or a production, you know, when you're building the circuit board, if you have, like, high defect rate, we ended up having everything else go pretty smoothly, except, you know, the firmware took a little bit longer than we thought it would.

But that always happens, I feel like, when you're trying to put out software releases, whether it's, you know, software that's running on a physical device or software that's running, you know, on a computer, right, or, like, you know, something that you deliver electronically, like a hosted app or something like that.

But, no, we had a lot of issue with the plastics company that we had chosen. We did this process called urethane molding. I don't know if you ever heard of that. - Is that my polyurethane?

- Yeah, so what they do is they do, like, a flexible mold for prototyping reasons. It's not meant for production, but we actually did, like, physical, plastic, injection-molded prototypes using this less expensive urethane process.

And we were so impressed with the quality that we just went with the same, you know, supplier for the full production run as well. And we ended up having a lot of quality issues with, you know, parts not fitting together the right way, specifically to the way that the plastic covering the display fit into the plastic front housing.

We originally were gonna mold it in two parts, so it was gonna be like, you mold the clear plastic screen, and then you mold, like, the plastic front housing around it. So those parts get, like, essentially fused together, you know, it's, like, a two-part molding process, and they just couldn't get it to work, you know,

after weeks and weeks. And so we ended up having to change it to molding them separately, and then doing an ultrasonic weld between the two parts where you vibrate them together, basically, at, like, high frequencies.

And it creates, like, a weld. It's the same way that, like, treasure and ledger, I think, to seal their device, where they don't use, like, adhesive. They put the two parts together, you know, the front half and the back half, and then you put it into, like, a fixture, and then you kind of move this thing over it.

It is actually ultrasonically evolving the parts together. So that's what we ended up doing here. And even then, I think we ran into some quality issues with, like, slight scratches, you know, like, on the plastic, on the clear plastic, which usually are not noticeable.

We ended up forcing them to, like, redo it with another thousand parts. And so at some point, when we were shipping, we switched over from the original plastic to a slightly improved plastic, you know?

And so that helped a bit. But we're definitely looking to try to do slightly higher quality plastic, you know, for whenever we do, you know, the next cycle. - Nice, and the, is it, like, rose gold look that you've gone for here, rose gold or copper?

- So, yeah, it is copper. So it's, yeah, and I love how that turned out. - Yes. - Yeah, so the whole, like, we call it the mid housing, but, you know, that part that holds the batteries and everything has little cut out for the camera.

It's actually casted out of a zinc alloy. So that's like a metal casting process. And then we have it plated in real copper. So it's not, not solid copper, right? But it was real copper. - It cost about five for anyone, if it was.

- Go over to your ground, sayings. - We should do a real one, you know, in solid copper, like a special edition, but why would you buy that? Like, we don't want to be assholes and pretentious, you know?

It's like, you'd be better off just spending the money on the sats, you know, not on the copper. But we were, you know, joking around, saying let's do it at a, you know, do a solid gold one or something.

- There'll be somebody buying it, you know. - Yeah, it can make one of them see what happens. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, but we're really happy with how that part turned out. You know, besides that, I think it was pretty much plastic, you know, concerns.

And once we got that sorted out, I think everything came together really nicely. You know, we've been shipping since the very beginning of May, or it's like the very end of April. And we should be sold out pretty soon, which I'm also really excited about.

- Amazing. And then what happens at that point when you're sold out and another order can come in, or you're just like, well, tough shit, no one else can have one. - No, definitely, we'll have more coming in for sure.

You know, it's just, the supply chain stuff has been difficult. It's, I mean, I'm sure you hear, you know, all over the place, but it's real, you know, like, even the processor that we use in this thing, I think, and these are just rough numbers to like, don't quote me.

I think it was like six bucks when we originally placed an order for them back at the end of 2020. It was like, we bought in a quantity of a thousand, you know, we're slightly over a thousand, feel like 1,050 of them, or like 1,100 of them, 'cause you always gotta buy a little bit more, you know, - Voice-tech.

- Yeah, and anything that goes wrong too during assembly. It was like around six bucks. Now we're at over nine, maybe over 10. - Wow. - And for the same damn part, right? And the lead times are outrageous.

And it's not just the processor though. You know, it's everything. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to say how can we actually lower the price of the product as opposed to, you know, we already have a premium product.

We're definitely not gonna charge more than $2.99 U.S. dollars for it. That would be a little crazy. It's already pushing it in terms of, you know, the price point I think. - Don't tie yourself in though, because you don't know what the dollar's gonna do.

- That's a great point. $2.99 in a few years could literally be toilet paper. - You know what, that's actually a really, that's a really wise comment I think that you just made. You know, that's a great point.

I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to think like, you know, I don't want to be just like lazily passing these costs to our customers, right? I want to figure out, you know, if we're gonna get hit with higher costs in some place, you know, what can we do to actually lower the costs, you know, and fight that inflation basically, right?

And it's gonna be tough. It's truly insane what's been happening in the world and supply chains are obviously one of the components there. And it makes me nervous, you know, as a device maker, what if things get really bad?

What if we literally can't get anything, you know, at all for some period of time? Can we sustain the company and so on? So those are just things that we're thinking about today. - Yeah, a lot of people are literally just stockpiling.

People are getting concerned about just for everything. I mean, it's everything. I'm working on a 1960s airstream at the moment. I'm having built and rebuilt. - Beautiful. - It's gonna be lovely when it's done.

And a lot of it, I've had to outsource just simply 'cause of time, otherwise I'd do the majority myself. But it's down to, it's like every single thing. I'll get a call and whoever I'm dealing with will go, "Oh, you're not gonna like this."

You know, the MDF that would have been this much, it's now three times that. And you know, this melamine that would be this, it's three times that, or we can't get hold of this. And it's just like everything feels like it's at a standstill and everyone around the world just can't get the hands on anything.

And you're just thinking like, where does this end? And do they want it to end? It is the next question because it's like, it feels to me, I don't know, it feels like some of the issues that we have at the moment aren't reasonable.

- Yeah, I, you know, the phrase, never attribute to malice. I forgot these-- - I know, you may. - Yeah, yeah, I know, just stupidity, right? And I think part of it is just how over-optimized everything's become.

But this gets back to like, why are we building this thing? Why are we assembling this thing in the United States? Like we're spending more money to do that, right? And there's a security component to it.

Like if we're building something that's touching your private keys, we don't want to just outsource that to China. So that's one aspect of it. But there's this other aspect of like, seeking resiliency in a sense, knowing that like, you have control over the process and that if something goes wrong,

like it's up to you to figure out how to fix it. So like one thing I'm really proud of is, and I can't give any exact dates, but this first batch that we're doing is 1,000 units. And like I mentioned, we should be sold out pretty soon.

And we already have, I think, and I don't want to jinx it, but pretty much everything's secured that we need for the next like 2,500, you know or so. - Okay, good. - And so I don't know exactly when that's gonna come together for shipping it, 'cause we've had to make some slight changes, just based on like, what material we could get.

But it's kind of fun to know that in this craziness, one of the advantages of being a little bit smaller, you know, and having a little bit more control over every single component that's going into your product is that you can be really flexible and completely change things, like on a dime.

You can say, okay, this component, no longer available. So let's change some stuff, you know, and get a different component. And I think what happens when you get bigger and you have like a larger company, whether it's parts for like, you know, automobile or, you know, what you're doing with your Airstream

or, you know, whether it's a larger, you know, electronics maker, is that you don't have that same flexibility. And there's also, I think, a laziness to it. For us, it's like, okay, well, we need to change this part, which means now we need to change the plastic design, which means we need to go drop, you know,

20 to $30,000 on new plastic tooling. Okay, like sure, let's do it. And so we have that flexibility to do that kind of stuff because probably, from being honest, you know, with myself, because we're new and we're still small and we're a little stubborn about having a little bit more control, you know, over what we're making

and where we're making it. And so for now, that's an asset, you know, but it can easily become a liability if you get more successful and then you don't have that same flexibility. - Well, and when it's smaller, it's more of a passion thing than isn't it?

You know, you're building something that you care about and love. And I think when companies get to a certain size, not only are they not able to maneuver, like you said, it's like, you know, the dingy versus the tanker or who can turn quicker.

And the smaller one always can. So you've got that advantage. But, you know, as well as that advantage, it is that passion thing. And being able to be close to a team and have that shared vision because otherwise that gets lost, I think in these massive companies.

Although I know that you have been growing your team, you've managed to stack one of the, well, probably the second most valuable asset on the planet, which is Bitcoin Q&A and others as well.

So how's that been? How's it been growing the team? - I'm honestly floored by the whole Q&A thing because he is truly phenomenal, right? And we didn't have a job opening, you know, in that role.

We weren't actively hiring anyone. And, you know, he came to us after, I think it was after getting his hands on a device, you know, on a passport. And he did a really fantastic guide with Sparrow Wallet.

And we, you know, never miss out on the opportunity to bring him on to the team. Even though we were, you know, done hiring at that point, you know, not planning to hire anyone else. And, yeah, I mean, what a guy, you know.

And what an honor, I think, to be able to have him want to work with us. It was honestly like extremely validating for me that he actually wanted to, you know, work with us. I think that was just mind-blowing.

It's almost like how I feel too, if I'm listening to like a podcast or something and I go to follow someone on Twitter and I see they're already following me, like, damn, like, why is this guy following me?

And it was that times like a thousand, you know. - Well, it seems that foundation devices has got a real following from a specific group. And they are the group that I tend to interact with most.

And it's people who really fucking care about open-source software and they care about Bitcoin and they care about privacy. And it seems like this passport is just the sort of fan favorite at the moment.

And I can see why, like, I really like using it. I think this is the one that I would get people to use even if they don't care about free open-source software, even if they don't care about the privacy stuff.

If I'm just onboarding a new, 'cause it's really easy, but it also has that benefit. So I think that's why Q&A and a lot of these others are just like, right, fuck, this is the future because they can see it, they can smell it.

- Yeah, I mean, I appreciate you saying that. And one thing we talked about, I think on the last pod back in January was how most open-source hardware is made for a specific audience. Like it's either the developers that are using it for work or it's the free open-source software privacy, cypherpunk oriented people.

And for that reason, there's never like an emphasis on good design. What we set out to do was to make just great stuff that happens to be open-source. So sure, it's like the open-source is like a key part of our mission and values as a company, but our selling point is not supposed to be,

oh, it's open-source 'cause if that's your selling point, you're always gonna get out-competed by someone that is just making the better product in terms of design, user experience and so on.

And so our thought was that if we're gonna play in the space, if we're gonna make Bitcoin-centric products, they have to be open-source. It's like not even really an option because the hardware serves as the foundation for the software and if the software is open-source, then the hardware has to be open-source.

And so it was like kind of like a no-brainer thing, but man, we raised a seed round of capital in June and at that point in time, there were just four of us, four founders and now there's 12 of us and all that happened in the last three months.

- That's awesome. - It's wild because my role has changed so much from doing so many things myself to now kind of just like managing a team, right? And just thinking about bringing on the best possible people and Q&A is obviously a rock star, but everyone we've brought on has been incredibly talented and multidisciplinary.

I describe it as like, I don't know where this term came from, but like T-shaped people, where you're kind of deep in one area, but then you're kind of broad in other areas and some of them have a lot of Bitcoin experience, some of them don't, but most of the hires have actually been software engineers doing firmware or other stuff.

And yeah, it's incredible that we're a real team now, I feel like we're kind of capable of taking on anything at this point. - That's really cool. And how's that changed in terms of, if there was four of you before and now 12, how's that changed things for you?

Like, what's it allowed you to think about and do and you know, obviously your way of working will have changed? How has that changed the way that you're thinking about the future? - I think I'm just thinking a lot more, maybe not, I don't want to say strategically 'cause that doesn't really mean anything.

They can just a lot more about the world, you know, and where we're headed over this decade. I think that's the best part of it for me, has just been able to zoom out a little bit. 'Cause when you're starting a company, we started in April of 2020, you know, last year, right in the beginning of COVID.

We quit our jobs, we halved our salaries, we started the company when we had 75K committed from investors, which is not really smart because that doesn't give us much runway and a lot of that money you need just for the prototyping and stuff, you know, 'cause we're doing physical devices.

And we didn't have, you know, I guess any of my savings, you know, are in Bitcoin, right? And so it's always a huge challenge and a decision of like, you know, do you liquidate some of that investment in the beginning of 2020 in order to fund this?

Do you take outside capital? You know, what do you do? And of course, we ended up taking outside capital and then every single day after that is just heads down, you know, zoomed in. How do I survive to the next month?

How do we, you know, secure enough capital to keep us going? You know, how do we deal with every single challenge that's gonna pop up in order to bring this product to market? And so I feel like in the last few months, I've really been able to just take a step back and listen to a lot more podcasts, you know,

read a little bit more, think about the world, think about crazy shit that's happening. I think my favorite stuff to listen to has been the podcast with Laser Hoddle. - Oh, they were so good.

- Yeah, my mind has like expanded because of that. And thinking about in this, you know, in this world where we're kind of phasing out a monetary paradigm and there's competing paradigms, whether it's Bitcoin that's gonna succeed, you know, whether it's gonna be some central bank digital currency

from like the IMF and a bunch of countries together, whether it's gonna be China's, you know, central bank digital currency, like whatever the new paradigm's gonna be, it's like trying to thinking more about what kind of products do we need to build to help, you know, help the Bitcoin future, be the path that ends up winning, right?

Like I think that's the kind of stuff I've had more time to think about. And honestly, like until a few months ago, I barely had any time to think about that. - Yeah, you can't have any introspective thinking or have a chance to take a step back and just view the world like you're doing now.

And obviously you've got to do what you've got to do because you've got to build a product that you said you're gonna build and you've got to make it as good as you said it was gonna be because otherwise you'd sound like a bit of a dick.

(laughing) And so I'm sure that was going through your head and I'm sure you worked yourself to the bone to do it and you've done it now. And like you said, it's now looking out and listening to what's happening in the world is gonna allow you to work out where you go next.

And that's incredibly important. - Yeah, and I feel like when you're doing a startup like that and you put so much pressure on yourself in the beginning, you can find yourself in a state of like fight or flight, like on a continuous basis, which isn't really good for you but you kind of have to get into that state.

Like I found between all the COVID stuff and if you remember in the beginning of COVID, the Bitcoiners thought it was gonna be like end of the world. (laughing) We all like overreacted and then we immediately kind of figured out, wait a minute, this is not, you know, killing 10% of the population.

But in the beginning, we all thought it was gonna be really bad, I remember, you know, stocking up on stuff and everyone thinking I was, you know, total nut job, right? Like very early on in the beginning and then that plus, you know, starting the company, it just, you know, I feel like I experienced like actual

anxiety and I never experienced that before. I've experienced, you know, actually I was, you know, one of the other best podcasts that I'm not done yet is your recent one with a Ben Gunn, which I'm like-- What a guy. What a, that might be one of the best podcasts of all time, so I feel like I have to listen to it again.

You know how he was talking about, you know, when you're in a job that you don't wanna do, you can get like almost ill, right? You can get like physical effects. So I've had that before. I feel like we all have and if you haven't, then you're probably lucky to not have gone through that.

But when you're doing something even that you want to do, sometimes you end up putting such an enormous amount of pressure on yourself that you still almost have like physical effects, right?

You feel like you're in that constant state of fight or flight. And so I feel like being able to exit out of that, you know, and that really opens up your mind to, I think, just being able to think, you know, think more clearly and really take like a breather.

- Yeah, when you're in that state, it's literally you're just running off adrenaline because it's exhausting to be working long hours, to be thinking about the crazy shit that's going on, which, you know, is so crazy that if you're not careful, you can actually go mad yourself because you think, well, am I the lunatic

that's thinking that the world's going this way and everyone else is right? And trying to control that and do the hours and everything else, what happens is you just literally focus in and run off the adrenaline and you can do it for so long, but you will eventually crash, you will eventually crash and burn, and you can't, like you said,

you can't think about bigger picture stuff because when you're in flight or flight, it is literally that, it's like I need to survive, you're in full on survival mode. - Exactly. So like one of the things I've been thinking about now is look at how fragile our entire internet is.

Look at what just happened with Facebook where one little, whether it was a mistake or whether it was, you know, an employee that may be intentionally did this, I have no idea, but one tiny DNS mistake, which from my understanding, and this is not at all my area of expertise, but it's so convoluted the way that the internet

is set up today, you know, one little mistake and all of it just goes down. Over a billion people, you know, use WhatsApp to communicate, and it's just gone for a whole day. And when I think about that combined with, you know, like the great reset narrative, as laser has been educating us all about, you know,

maybe impending cyber threats or something in that category, you know, what happens if it goes down for a week? What happens if it's more than just Facebook? And so when I think now, when I'm trying to figure out what our product roadmap should be as a company, all of a sudden in the last couple months,

more resilient communication networks has been top of mind. - Right, I mean, when you're talking about more resilient communication networks, are you thinking like mesh networks or something different?

- Something that combines all of it, I think. - Okay. And I've had a bunch of, you know, those Gotena devices? - Yeah. - I got a bunch of them like right when Samurai was doing their TX Tena integration where you could like broadcast, you know, Bitcoin transactions over those, they're really cool.

It's not that, it's like there's this huge network effect issue where it only makes sense practically if a lot of people have them, and it doesn't have to be a lot of people like everyone, but you have to be able to cover like a pretty decent geographical area.

But I think like if we wanna make things like phones and stuff, you know, down the line, which we still do, why not put the hardware in, you know, that allows you to have some of that longer distance mesh style communication?

Like why not? - Yeah, that would be really cool. - And then this kind of brings me to another thing that I'm trying to figure out, which is, you know, we're, we are a more traditional company in the sense that, you know, we're raising venture capital, right?

We've raised two rounds of venture capital. We're not like self, we're not bootstrapped, you know? And we kind of have a need if we're gonna keep doing that to experience a lot of growth, right?

To scale from, you know, 1,000 customers to 10,000 to 100,000 and so on. And it's like, how do you reconcile that with wanting to just build the best possible tech for a specific subset of users?

In this case, you know, Bitcoiners that want to be able to achieve sovereignty, privacy, you know, and so on. And so my hope is that the Bitcoiner segment grows. (laughs) Because then it becomes easy, you know?

That's what I hope will happen, that, you know, we're able to bring sovereignty to more people so that more people pursue sovereignty, lower those barriers so that we can then grow as a, you know, venture backed company.

And so that's kind of what we're hoping for. - I think that's a pretty safe bet, to be honest with you. (laughs) I think that the amount of people who are going to click and understand Bitcoin over the coming years is gonna be shocking to most people are pretty sure about it.

I mean, it's getting to the point now where there's no other option. There are more and more people who are starting to question things. And at the same time as they're questioning more, we've got Bitcoin rallying at the moment.

We've got all this uncertainty. The education in the space is getting better. The quality of the products in the space is getting better. Onboarding is getting easier. And I just have this feeling that everyone who's really, really pissed off will eventually just click and go, "Oh, this is how I protest."

And then they're gonna wanna have devices that are really slick and usable and work. And when they start to care about free open source, which people will eventually, I'm sure of it, then you're there.

You don't have to go and find these people. They're gonna come to you, I'm sure. - Yeah, that's our hope as well. And we haven't done any kind of marketing, which is really fun to just watch ourselves organically grow.

And we're not at any crazy rush either as long as we get to sell through our first batch of units and collect all that customer feedback and keep improving things. We feel really confident about where we are.

I think what's really nice about being steeped in Bitcoin for many years is that you have that lower time preference. I think a lot of venture backed companies have a high time preference because they're thinking very short term in terms of how do I make our metrics look really good so I can raise the next round of capital.

And I think when ends up happening is they end up chasing metrics, not chasing product or even more importantly, values. So we've been very deliberate about codifying our values. You can go right onto our website, you can read mission statement, you can read values.

I don't really see that too often from most companies these days. It's hard to know usually what a company actually stands for. We've also been really deliberate about codifying values internally.

And I think that's been one of the reasons why we've had a pretty straightforward time onboarding everyone who we've brought on in the last three months and growing the team. Because it's like, hey, here's our list of values.

If you're working here, this is our external values and these are our internal values. And we have a huge state of urgency and speed in terms of how we wanna make and ship our products. But as a company, we are confident that as long as we kind of follow our values, the Bitcoin thing is inevitable.

We just have to kind of wait. And so like one of our internal values is we celebrate when work is thrown out, which is such a fun one when you're doing hardware because it means that like we have the flexibility to throw out like half of what we were working on and completely swap out the components,

drop another $30,000 on new plastic tooling and then like ship something. And most companies that are building physical devices like would never do that. And we don't really carry on what's a little bit of money now if it means that we get another iteration of product, we're able to ship stuff, we're able to collect feedback

from our customers, we're able to empower more people with being able to store their own Bitcoin and achieve a little bit of sovereignty. It all kind of fits with the values. And then what's also really nice is that even though we're still dependent on external capital, as Bitcoin continues to increase in value,

we could end up in a situation where the company's Bitcoin holdings just end up allowing us to continue growing, right? And continue funding R&D and growth in the team. We as a company hold Bitcoin, which is really nice.

One thing I'm really proud of as a venture back company is taking some of that money we raised and just immediately buying Bitcoin with it. Most investors will not let that happen. Like most investors, and I've talked with other CEOs in the space, a lot of them have a really hard time with their investors or boards letting them

actually purchase Bitcoin. And we luckily, I mean, this was actually one of the things before we even signed a term sheet for the seed round, I was very clear and said, like, are you okay with us taking some percentage of this money raised and just market buy and they're like, sure, it's your money, once we give it to you,

like you do what you want with it. And I was like, great, sold. And then personally as well, one of the things I'm really proud of too is that early in the year in order to ensure that we had enough capital and we weren't like super pressured to raise money on like terms that might not have been as favorable.

I took a Bitcoin back loan on Unchain Capital and loaned the company some money. And that was, yeah, that was a very empowering feeling, to be able to do that without having to sell anything, which is really, really empowering.

And that's another thing that worked. Yeah. Sorry, cutting off. And it won't work so it was good. 'Cause it's something that I've sometimes considered and I'm like, you know, is it worth, 'cause I know like Hoddle Hoddle did something like that.

And then you've got, what's the other company that everyone seems to think is a scam. You can't say this, you can't say the name and I can't think of it, doesn't matter. It will come in a little.

Is it, oh, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna say BlockFi. That's it, BlockFi. Yeah. And so BlockFi-- I can say it, yeah. Okay. But yeah, and everyone's like, oh, they're a fucking scam.

Don't go near them. And I'm like, okay, well, in theory, it makes a lot of sense. And like a lot of hardcores will come and like attack me for this. But it does make sense. Like sometimes you do need to finance something.

You do need to do something. And there is, and this is a big theme of the conversation I had with Ben Gunn. It's like, you can't eat sats. You can't just go through life just hoddling and think that that's the most important thing because it's not the most important thing.

Sometimes building a product or a service or whatever it is that you're deciding to do is actually more important because what if you don't survive? What if something bad happens to your family or whatever?

You have to actually think outside of just stacking sats sometimes. And if you don't wanna sell, this makes a lot of sense. So what was that process like? Was it worrying for you? Or were you like, no, I'm comfortable with this?

- I think there were a couple of things. One was that, I mean, like the unchained capitals and no brainer because then it's in, it's like a multi-sig. - Like collaborative custody. - Collaborative custody thing where you can actually take the, you could download the multi-sig config

and you can load it up into whatever wallet of your choice. Let's say blue wallet. And you can watch your funds sit there. - Yeah. - That is why, like in that model, it actually is less scary because I know that unchained capital.

And by the way, I'm not like trying to shelf for them or I'm just a customer, right? Like we don't have any other-- - Yeah, we've just taken some money for this with folks doing it. (laughing) - I don't have any relationship with these guys.

I wish they gave me, you know, lower interest or something, right? But, and also hopefully they will integrate passport, you know, at some point in the near future. But that aside, just as a customer, you know, knowing that I can literally open a blue wallet and check that they haven't, you know, done anything with my collateral.

It feels much better, you know, with a block-fi or anything else. - Yes. - You don't know what they're, you know, they're probably re-hypnoticating exactly. And that's where you start to think, well, what happens to something with them?

Something goes wrong with them. And then all my money's gone. With unchained, it's like, okay, well, there's like a third party in the mix. If they go out of business, I could theoretically go to the third party and they could, you know, sign the, you know, the other, the other key, one of the two or three,

and then I can get my money back. So from that perspective, it works well. Interest rates are a little too high still, because paying like 11%, which is kind of wild when you also have to post like 2.5x of the principal as collateral.

- Yeah, that's, that's pretty big. But then, I mean, I suppose the difference is you don't have to sell. So then presumably it's not a taxable event. And the other thing is that it's better than credit cards.

- Yes. - And so there are certain situations where if you're not really touching, it's weird. 'Cause if you're not really touching the legacy financial system anymore, then obviously your credit score goes right down.

Like I used to have a perfect credit score. Absolutely perfect. Everyone would loan me money, no problem. Now, no one wants to touch me because I don't use anything, I've paid things off.

Like I'm trying to be, trying to be self-solving. And they're like, I don't wanna fucking lend you money. You actually pay it back, you know? So in those sort of situations, then it's actually, it's like, well, do I use a credit card or do I do this?

Well, okay, you know, it probably could get lower somewhere, but that's not bad, 11. - Yeah, there's something too about it where it feels really empowering. I think it works really well in this specific situation where you have assets in Bitcoin.

You know that like, okay, so let's say, you know, I know what runway my company has. I know how much money we're spending each month. I know we're in discussions with investors for the next funding round.

I don't wanna find myself psychologically in a place or I feel like we're about to run out of money. We weren't like at risk or anything, but I just didn't wanna box myself into a corner 'cause what happens from like a negotiating perspective and from just like a health perspective, right?

I mentioned like that state of fight or flight, you know? You wanna try to put yourself in a situation where you have a good standing and a negotiation. You don't want to just go kind of feel like you're rushing 'cause you're back is against the wall and you're-- - You're desperate.

- You're desperate, that's not, and then I feel like the investors smell that as well. - Yeah. - So you don't wanna ever be in that situation. And so knowing like, okay, I have the ability to loan the company some money if I want to.

I could sell some of my Bitcoin holdings, but I don't have to sell because I can just borrow against them. And sure, I need to end up posting that as collateral. But the worst thing that happens is I get liquidated and I get forced into selling it effectively.

So if you already know that you might have to sell it and that or you decide you want to make this investment in fiat, whether it's a loan in an investment or so on, and you know that you have the money to do it, it's very liberating to not have to sell the Bitcoin.

And then you gotta think of it as the interest rate, it's really just like a price you're paying to not have to sell the Bitcoin. It's the price you're paying to avoid the taxable event, which is meaningful, right?

But it's also the price you're paying to be able to keep the Bitcoin at the price that you bought it at, right? And, you know, as a long-term Bitcoiner, the goal is never sell your Bitcoin.

And so I think we're gonna get much more comfortable as an industry, what the idea of borrowing against it. 'Cause I think it's a perfect form of collateral. And there's also something so liberating about it in terms of like, fuck you money, where if something happens and, you know, for whatever reason, the company is unable to raise,

you know, capital from traditional sources, knowing that, you know, obviously, depending on the Bitcoin price, I and others can use our Bitcoin to invest or keep the company operating and keep making products and employing this team of people, that's very empowering.

It kind of changes how you feel about yourself, right? You're not dependent on someone else. You're strategically dependent on someone else because you don't want to liquidate your Bitcoin when you're only at $55,000, you know, dollars per Bitcoin and you want to hold it as long as you can, but it just feels really liberating

to know that you can hop onto one of these websites, you know, like an unchained and immediately convert that into some amount of fiat without needing to sell. And then if you can do that with real estate, if you can do that, you know, with other things, I could see Bitcoiners being able to live off their Bitcoin

investments by real important things, right? Like whether it's timber, you know, and investing in that land, whether it's farmland, whether it's energy producing facilities, like power plants or other sources of energy, for us to be able to convert the Bitcoin into that without selling the Bitcoin is kind of like an enormous fuck you.

And it's like a huge opportunity for transfer of resources to Bitcoiners who have lower time preferences. And I'm really excited about that future. - It's such a huge change because it changes it from, if you need a loan and you need one for whatever reason, it's not a lender making a decision depending on a criteria that they've made up

that is absolute fucking bullshit. And you're waiting, like, please lend me the money, please. - What it is, is you're saying to yourself-- - Or discriminating based on whether it's race, whether it's your economic situation, whether it's where you live or what your occupation is.

If you're people, you know, we've heard stories about people who have Bitcoin related stuff in their bank transaction history, not being able to secure, you know, mortgages or not being able to open a bank account, right?

- I've had three close down in the last year. - Oh, my God, my God. - Yeah. - That's insane, yeah. - Yeah, it's disgusting, but that's amazing because then the only person you're asking is yourself.

You're saying, can I loan this Bitcoin and then it just comes down to the decision is you? Can I? - Yep. - Yes, I can because this is the perfect collateral. So no one's gonna say, is it good enough or isn't it?

They're like, is it Bitcoin? Yes, it is, okay, well, then it's perfect. So yes, I will give you this loan. And are you willing to take that personal risk because you do it. You have to have confidence in yourself or whatever you're investing in, right?

That you have the ability to pay off this loan in the future or maybe or that Bitcoin's always gonna go up and you can just take out a new loan to replace the whole one, which will probably happen.

But we're not in that environment yet. And you also have to be able to put down more collateral out of moments notice. I almost got like liquidated. I forgot that crazy drop we had earlier this year.

I think it went to like 20% or something. Yeah, I remember waking up and I was in bed and I checked the Bitcoin price and I like ran to my computer to go through a more, to pull out my hardware wallet and you know, send some more money to, you know, to unchain to be able to make sure.

I mean, it was, I wasn't gonna get liquidated but it was pretty close. And so you have to be able to have that conviction in yourself. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause it's an ethical thing as well. You have to decide, you know, firstly, do I trust myself that I can pay it back?

Secondly, do I believe what I'm investing in is actually worth investing in or doing, which then makes you probably make better decisions because it's not easy. Parting with your SATs or potentially passing with your SATs is so horrible that you have to really, really think about it.

And on a sort of ethical standpoint, you're thinking, well, I want these SATs to be with me. I want them to be with strong hands. I want them to be with someone who actually wants a better world.

I do not want the fiat fuckery type of people to get their hands on them and play games. I wanna hold them myself. And so there's no other real option other than the lending. If you're 100% in, then you don't have anything else that you can play with and then you can't build.

And then if you're talking about building a better world, then how do you do it? So yeah, it does make a lot of sense. Yeah, and I think too, so if you kind of take the premise that over this decade, things are gonna get worse in terms of monetary stability for the US dollar and kind of the existing global financial system.

And you also then believe that the central banks, the Fed are going to continue to intervene, whether it's government stimuli, whether it's keeping interest rates low, printing money and so on.

In an environment of very low to maybe even negative interest rates, there's a lot of really interesting opportunities for Bitcoiners in terms of being able to access capital at very low interest rates and kind of beat the fiat at its own game.

Speculative attack it. Yeah, that's really what it feels like. And obviously what Sailor is doing and that kind of thing, that's the perfect example. And that's not anything that a normal person could access in terms of that amount of capital at that 0% interest rate.

It's kind of mind boggling to think about that. But as there's a little bit more competition in lending, I think we're gonna see the Bitcoin lending interest rates come down with more competition and with more interest.

And I don't know if the Bitcoin price will be stable. I don't know, I'm guessing there'll still be an enormous amount of volatility throughout this decade. But it really opens up the possibilities for Bitcoiners to be able to turn that Bitcoin into fiat for almost no cost and then use that fiat to purchase productive assets.

And that, whether that's land or some kind of real estate or purchasing businesses, what happens when the miners start buying the power, the energy producers, a lot of people say the energy producers are gonna become miners.

I always wonder if it's gonna be the opposite. We're gonna get into, I think, a really interesting and kind of exciting world. And last year, I had a mindset, I remember like ranting all the time about how I hate how I was paying monthly for my phone.

I hate the idea of being like technically in debt, right? You're paying monthly for a $1,000 phone. You actually owe $1,000. It's no interest, but you're filling out like a loan application to purchase that smartphone.

So I went from being very uncomfortable with that notion and wanting to just own everything, to thinking, is there anything wrong with playing the fiat games when it actually is in our favor?

- I'm completely with you. Definitely play the games if you can make use of them. Definitely, if there's basically zero interest on something, why wouldn't you take out that loan in the currency that you know is devaluing so that when you have to pay it back, it's worth less and keep it in the asset that you know is going up in value.

It's like an obvious thing to do. And so if you can do it, you should. And have you ever read the article by Pierre Richard, speculative attack? - I'm not sure. If not, it's well worth listening to, reading through.

He, I think he wrote it in like 2014 or something like that. And he basically is outlined pretty much what sailors doing and what we're talking about. And we're saying like, this is what I think is gonna happen because interest rates have to go down.

You know, they've got themselves into this mess. And here's how we attack the dollar. And it just makes so much sense logically. I can't see, it doesn't seem like they have another way out.

And it also seems like we are at war with them, you know, they do not want us to do what we're doing. And so fuck it, if it's war, let's get the battle gear on and let's use the tools that are available.

- Yeah, when I think about, I think there's different types of the speculative attacks. I think what like sailors doing is, you know, the more simple one, just using the fiat to buy more Bitcoin.

And he essentially is securing that against his company's future revenue. So that's like a cool way to do it. I think the really interesting thing, which I've only started to think about in the last several months, even just the last three months or so, listening to a podcast with laser or like untapped growth

and you know, that kind of stuff is using that fiat instead of buying Bitcoin with it to actually go and buy, you know, productive assets, or invest in building productive assets. That's where things start to look a lot more like the, like the happy ending of Atlas Shrugged, you know,

where you have, you know, more of like a Citadel type future. And it's just so interesting to think that that could be financed through the fiat and through the low interest rate environments without actually having to sell Bitcoin up until like a year ago, I thought I was going to have to sell Bitcoin, you know,

in the future to finance things. It's really beautiful. And it gets me really excited about our chances in this decade, you know, to really, I guess, succeed. - Yeah, and it's nice to have that outlook rather than the fearful one of like the world's getting worse, what do we do, all we can do is hold Bitcoin.

As, you know, as well, I love talking to Joel and Ben and people like this, because it's like, they're actually doing something. They're actually saying, no, fuck this. I'm actually going to do something about this.

I'm actually going to build something. I'm going to create something and I'm not going to allow this fiat culture to exist. So I'm going to make something better. And it's really exciting because when you have conversations with these guys, you know, when you've done business for enough time and you've dealt with enough people,

you can speak to people and they talk and they say what they're going to do. And you know that it's never going to happen. When you speak to these guys, you know it is. You know, it doesn't matter what stands in their way.

They will make it happen. And it's really, really exciting. And the more conversations I have with a lot of the EU plebs as well and on the Metrodale monthly shows and all these sort of things, it does make me excited and confident about our future.

It doesn't mean it's going to be easy but I know which side I want to be on, that's for sure. - And it's so funny you said that because one of our company values, which is listed right on our website, you know, from the day we, you know, launched publicly, is that, you know, foundation products reflect our optimism about the future.

We are building a better internet based on a better form of money. Our products feel positive, aspirational, and a bit sci-fi. So like we, that's what we did from day one, right? We were saying.

- I love it. - And I'm sick of, I'm sick of the pessimism, right? Because we have so much to be optimistic about. Our chances are very high. You know, whether we're going to have a world that adopts a Bitcoin standard, which I think we will, or whether we're going to more build this parallel economy, right, opt out of the existing system.

I don't know what the real outcome is going to be. It could be like a divided kind of world, right? It could be that, I mean, even look at what, what the world is like today with China. Imagine that great firewall, you know, either spreading to other nations or having, you know, nations that are more repressed

versus nations that are, you know, more free, but, you know, taken to the extreme, maybe, compared to what we have today. I don't really know what's going to happen, but I know that we have a lot to be optimistic about.

And we don't need to scare people into, you know, using Bitcoin and choosing sovereignty. We can instead kind of inspire them to do so. And that's why we were kind of deliberate with the whole brand as well about not being like, not having like a dark color scheme.

You often see a lot of the companies in the Bitcoin space, especially the older ones. It's all like black as the primary color, you know? - Dark theme, scythe apparently. - Yeah, yeah. And we just, we're extremely deliberate in the brand building saying we're not going to do that.

We're trying to be more open, more, you know, aspirational, more optimistic. We want, we designed, you know, the product is something that you want to pick up, you know, and hold, maybe even fidget with.

We want it to be, you know, approachable. And that's how we kind of think about building just user interfaces and user experiences. It's all about being intuitive and approachable, welcoming.

And so that's just really important that we carry that through everything. - And is there anything coming down the pipeline that you could talk about, any, anything you're working on at the moment, future products or iterations?

- So I think the main thing I can talk about a little bit, my team always, my co-founders always tell me to like not say anything 'cause I always end up saying too much 'cause it's just so fun, you know, to talk about what we're building.

But I think the one cool thing we're doing is a mobile app because I mean, you have a passport now, you know, you've gone through the setup process. The setup process requires that you go to our website, you know, our support website.

It requires that you kind of click around to different places, you know, different link takes you to the terms of service, the supply chain verification step, which is really cool, but it opens in a new tab in your browser. - The last four words, isn't it?

- Yeah, exactly. And it has to be the words 'cause we can't do a QR scan back and forth from like your computer. - Right. - So instead we have to do a single scan and have you type in the words.

It'd be really cool if we could do it back and forth where you don't have anything to type in. So that's like, that's another thing. And then the firmware update, you know, you're having to plug the SD card into the computer.

You're having to go to, you have to download it, you know, the file from our site and save it to the SD card. You may do that from our GitHub, or you may do that from our website. And then you have to get it onto the device.

Then also just the whole onboarding flow. You know, you're kind of following along on the website and you're kind of going through the steps on your passport and sometimes it can be hard to keep those in sync properly, like you're scrolling through the website and so on.

And so what we really want to do is make a much better experience for onboarding and firmware updates. And even being able to give our customers and our users product updates without necessarily requiring that we email them because like if we have, let's say like we have, luckily we haven't had it yet

where we haven't had any kind of like security vulnerability reported to us that we have to quickly patch, I'm sure we will at some point. Every vendor who makes a hardware wallet has had that happen, no matter how good they are.

And it'd be really nice if we could send out like a push notification when that happened, instead of just like sending out an email and tweets and hoping that all our users, you know, see it and then update.

And so by doing a mobile app, we can do some really nice onboarding experiences and firmware updating experiences and so on. And so I think what we'll probably do is we'll probably ship like an SD card adapter for iOS or for Android, you know, with the next batch of devices.

And then if you already have a passport, you can buy one, right? You can buy like a lightning to micro SD or USB C to micro SD. They're like super cheap. And then you could use your phone to do firmware updates and stay up to date with important announcements and so on.

And then also, we don't have to then email you as well. If you want to, you can just get like the company updates to the app. So that's something really cool, I think, that we're doing now.

And I'm not sure exactly when we'll launch that, but one of our engineers is moving aggressively fast on that offering. - Very nice. And you're talking about these QR scans. I previously, with PSBT, had only ever done it with just shuffling back and forth.

I set this thing up with blue wallet. And it was, I think probably the easiest thing I've ever done in Bitcoin. I think it's probably one of the only times that I haven't fucked something up and called Bitcoin Q&A and being like, mate, I've done it again.

He's like, oh, come on, what have you broken now? And it was so slick because it was just scan, scan back and forth, done. I mean, it was just literally there. And then I have my watch only wallet on there.

And I can see what I've got there. And it's just like when I talk to people about onboarding them and using these sort of things, I know we can go best practice. And I know that there are ways to do it more securely, et cetera, et cetera.

I know that we could, I could try and set them up on your spectra or sparrow or something like that. I could do all these things. But if I have someone who has a phone, and if you bring out this app, and I say, right, download Blue Wallet, download this app, use this passport, I can sit with them.

And honestly, 20 minutes, they're set up, they've backed up onto their micro SDs, they've written down their words if they want to actually be a tin full hat like I am. I just didn't feel secure enough just having the micro SDs.

I wanted to have that as well. But, you know, it was about 20 minutes and it was working and I had no issues and that's rare. So, yeah, to have that app on the phone, I think would be brilliant.

They don't even need to touch a computer. - Right, and so we're definitely, you know, we're doing that, I don't have an exact timeline. And then there's still a couple of things with the app that we're trying to figure out.

So we know we wanna have just a fantastic onboarding experience. And it also makes the firmware update process a little bit less nerve-wracking. I mean, most people don't realize but like all our firmware updates are signed anyway.

So even if like you went to a phishing website and you downloaded, you know, like a malicious version of the firmware, it wouldn't install on your passport. - Oh. - And yeah, and then also we do something that might be unique.

We sign our firmware updates with a two of four signature scheme. So even if someone held a gun to my head in Boston and said up, you know, put out this, sign this malicious firmware update, I'd be like, I can't.

I mean, like sure, I can put one signature on there, but you're gonna have to go put a gun to someone else's head simultaneously. And like, you know, it helps a lot that we do that. So we already have that where, you know, it won't install, but there's just something I think can be really nice about not having to go to the website.

Just know that you have this app. And by the way, the app is going to connect over a tour. - By default, lovely. - So we don't need to know your IP address. We don't need to know anything about you, right?

You're like, if you're getting a firmware update from us, it's coming from our servers, but we don't even know where you are. And so I think that's also really important to kind of, you know, align with our values, right?

And respect our users' privacy. And then it's just less nerve-wracking, being able to go through that process on an app that you know is our app, as opposed to bouncing around to different websites and hoping that everything is, you know, okay.

It's just, I think it's just a more comforting. And it's just an easier experience, especially if you're giving it to a new user. So the two things we're trying to figure out, which I probably can't talk much about, but we're still not sure, is like one, could we do backups in a way where you don't need the SD card,

which gets really weird, really fast. And then two, do we want to do any kind of Bitcoin wallet built in? You know, like software wallet. Because one thing that's really important to us is that we're the hardware platform.

So our goal is not to compete with Blue Wallet, with Sparrow, with Casa, or Unchained, or any of these groups, right? Or any of these, you know, inspector. We want to make sure that Passport is widely compatible with like every popular wallet or custody service.

But that means that if you're a very like total beginner, you right now have to go into another app in order to get onboarded, like Blue Wallet, which is, I think, a great app. And that's what I use personally, right?

But we're thinking like, do we do some really basic wallet? That's so basic that you would probably hate it. That any like, any advanced Bitcoin-- - But I love it, it's basic, it's weird.

- No, but I mean like, no coin control, no transaction fee selection, like literally like bare bones, right? Because the idea would be that we wouldn't be competing with any of these other wallets.

We'd be offering something that's like, something that no one else offers. Because it's so like stupidly simple. And usually if you're going to make like a software wallet, you end up adding more features.

Like if you're like a Blue Wallet from a few years ago versus Blue Wallet today, there are so many features and I love it. - Yeah. - You know, sparrow too. I take advantage of a lot of these features, whether it's connecting it to my own node, what using lightning and multi-sig and single-sig, you know, and a watch only.

And I have like four watch onlys in my Blue Wallet, you know? Like it's like none of that, right? And so that's what we're trying to figure out where it's like, the theme comes down to, how do we get passport to be something that you can give to a friend that is completely new to Bitcoin and that person can onboard themselves

without having to ask any questions? That's what we're working towards. And that's kind of the theme of like what we're challenging ourselves to do. - That's a really interesting approach and it does make a lot of sense.

I think you can look at it two ways. You can go, oh, well, if it doesn't have coin control, it's pointless. If it doesn't have this feature, it's pointless. You know, I mean, you can attack it like that or you can look at it and say, well, is it actually making it possible for someone who would otherwise not feel comfortable

and would otherwise leave their coins on exchange? Yes. So then is it worth doing? Probably yes. And there's no one else really doing that. - I think moon is really good. I think they're doing a good job making it like super simple interface.

I don't know if you've tried that one out. - I've seen it in use, but I haven't actually got it on my phone. - That's the best example I can think of. But think about, I mean, I actually haven't used coinbase in a few years, but think about the typical exchange user interface.

You put in the address that you wanna send to and you click send and that's it. - Yeah. - You're not choosing all these features, right? And I also think about it as you know, 'cause you've been in Bitcoin for some time, Bitcoiners are always upgrading their security setups.

- Yes. - Like the whole point is you get someone to buy the Bitcoin usually on an exchange or maybe you send your friends some, you know, send your friends some sats. And then all of a sudden your friends buying more Bitcoin, your friend, I mean, this is an ideal world.

Your friend is withdrawing from the exchange and doing a hardware wallet. Then all of a sudden you're running your own node and you're connecting your software wallet to your node, right?

So you kind of have this step-by-step process. Yeah, and so what I'm saying is like, I don't think anyone is properly addressing the true like first step to the self custody game because there's so much to be intimidated by when you're using one of these software wallets.

And if we as the hardware wallet maker see that there's not any software wallet that makes it so brain dead easy just to get started, the goal isn't that you're gonna use the wallet for your entire life.

The goal is that you're gonna upgrade that setup to probably something else like Sparrow or Blue Wallet or Spectre, you know, over time. But we gotta get you off the exchange. And I can't believe all the crap that's been going around Twitter the last few days about telling people, I don't even know how it started,

but telling people that self custody isn't necessarily the best option for new users. And it's like, come on, like we can do better than that. We could just, it's just comes down to some UX stuff and we can do better than that.

- So that's what we're thinking about now and what we're working towards with the app. It'll be really fun to be able to release that in the coming months. - I really like that. And yeah, I like that you're thinking about the fact that this is step by step because a lot of people forget that, especially when they've been in for a while.

And you take for granted, it's like, you take for granted your security setup and you forget quite how difficult it is and how scary it can be. And I'll tell you a pretty embarrassing story about one of my first steps was, I didn't understand coin control at all.

I hadn't found Bitcoin Twitter. I didn't understand how to do any of this stuff. And the only thing was I'd watched a video or listen to someone talk about, he didn't want to have two transactions going into the same address because then they could be linked.

And so, I just went out and bought like 10 legend and OSes because I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll just have one for each transaction. 'Cause I didn't, I just didn't fucking understand.

And there was no one to talk to about it. I hadn't found Bitcoin Twitter. No one even knew what Bitcoin was that my friends or family or anyone like that. So, I was like, well, I'll just buy 10 of these and I'll just keep it there.

And then every time one was used and I'd made a transaction, then I'd wipe it and start fresh. And, you know, that's just like one example of one fuckwit who's gone and bought 10 devices that they didn't need to because they're not smart enough to work it out.

And I can't be the only one. So, yeah, I'll be sure people-- Maybe we should do that. That would allow us to 10x our password sales for you. Yeah, that's true, actually. That's true, yeah, scrap the feature, you'll be fine.

The other cool thing we're gonna do with Q&A, 'cause by the way, he is such a beast. I mean, the amount of video tutorials he's put out in the last week or so is insane. Yeah, I don't know what's wrong with that bloke.

Yeah, it's a fucking weird guy. He doesn't sleep. It's insane. It's outrageous. We're gonna pilot a service. I don't know if we're gonna do it later this year or early next year, 'cause it all depends on his time.

But you said you were or are like an Apple fan. And so, I don't know if you remember what Apple used to do when you bought a computer like in their store. My first job at a high school was working in the Apple store and they would try to get you to sell two things in addition to every computer purchase.

They would try to get you to sell the Apple care, which is like the extended warranty, which we might actually try to do something like that with Passport. It'd be really cool if we could offer it.

I think it's too early, 'cause we probably need a lot higher volumes of sales and figure out data in terms of defective units and that kind of thing. But that's something we're interested in.

The other thing they would try to get us to sell is the one-on-one. I think it was what it was called. It was like 99 bucks when you bought the laptop and you'd get like an hour or two onboarding session with like an Apple employee in the store.

- I'm like the genius and Apple genius. - So they have the genius, but this was different. This was like these, there was this level below genius. It was, it wasn't specialist. - Quite smart, specialty.

- It is, if you just sold, you were a specialist, right? Then there was like one or two other levels and then there was genius. And so there was this level below genius where you did all the trainings with customers where you bring in your shitty Windows laptop and you sit down with someone for an hour or two

and they help you move all your photos, all your files, all your crap from your shitty Windows computer to your fancy new Mac and you just pay like a flat fee of 99 bucks to do that. And so all of like the retail employees were kind of rated based on if you were able to upsell the customer with the AppleCare and with like the one-on-one.

And so Q&A has offered to basically do like pilot a one-on-one where you go buy a passport online, you can add another product to your cart where we can chat with you and walk you through the setup remotely.

- Great idea. - And it's a really cool idea and it's gated by people, I think. And so we're gonna pilot it out, I don't know when. And if it's successful, we might end up having to hire a bunch of people to do that and nothing would make me happier 'cause there's so many Bitcoiners that like know what they're doing with the setup

and have the ability to help people and are not like a developer, you know, or like an engineer or whatever. - I would love it. - And would absolutely love it. And so that's what I'm hoping we can do.

Right now we're letting him still get, he's only been with us for like two weeks. So we're still getting onboarded, doing all these tutorial videos. We have a lot of documentation to build out but expect to see that from us too in the next couple of months.

- Well, I cannot wait to see what else comes down the pipeline. As I said to you at the beginning, I really am impressed with what I have in my hands here. I don't know what I expected to be honest.

You know, we had the call about six months ago. I thought it looked really cool but you just never know. And as soon as I've taken it out of the box, it's blowing my mind. And I've only heard feedback that's very positive.

- Your hiring is on point, everything that you talked to me about seems like it's going to be a winner. So I think we need to do this in another six months and see where we are. - I'd love to.

- Yeah, always enjoy speaking to you, mate. It's been awesome and good luck with it all and any updates or anything like that. Just give me a shout. You're always welcome on here. - Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

I think in six months, we'll probably have a couple more things to share. So we'd definitely love to come back on and it was a pleasure to be here. Glad to see too that your pod has continued to gain more and more listeners.

And as soon as we hang up, I'm probably going to finish up that episode with Ben Gunn. So it's just so good. It's so good. But yeah. - If you ever are allowed out of the United States, you ever make your way to the UK.

You have to come and have a drink with me and him and a few others. We've got some really, really good Bitcoiners in the UK here. - Yeah, we'd love to. - Cool. All right, mate, we're speaking another six months.

Thanks again. - Sounds good. All right, bye.