Lesson 3: Sleep, Incentives, & Bitcoin's Core Values

Transcript

(0:01 - 0:12)

Hey everybody, welcome back. Episode three, got my coffee here. Today we're going to talk a little bit about sleep and blockchain, Bitcoin.

(0:12 - 1:11)

So that's quite the interesting combo. So yeah, grab a cup of coffee, push pause, take a minute, take a beat, and we can get into it. So as you can see, it's a little bit overcast out here today.

So like we talked about in our last video, things change. Sleep though, sleep is one of those leading metrics in your performance overall, how you approach the world, your mood, depression, anxiety, your creative capabilities, how well you can interact with others, how well you can build new things and create new things, come up with ideas. But sometimes when you get into this thing, this mode of creation, and you get excited and you find something that captures your fascination, it gets a little hard because you may wake up in the middle of the night, you may need to use the restroom, and then your brain starts going.

(1:12 - 1:21)

And then it's like, oh great, here we go. So you're in build mode all over again. And if you're like us, you're building pretty much 24-7, 365.

(1:21 - 1:44)

So your brain doesn't get that much of a break if you're always on, never off till the break of dawn. So what do you do about it? Well, one of the things we've tried is we got these red lens glasses. And these red lens glasses are really interesting because once you put them on, it actually blocks the blue and the green light from all the devices that we look at all day.

(1:44 - 2:03)

And so that helps your body regulate and get more in the sleep mind and sleep mode. But the other thing that happens, which is really interesting and was unexpected, I've tested this with a couple people when I was running around New York City, it actually brings your mood down. It clicks down the calmness level.

(2:03 - 2:20)

And so you just kind of go from amped up from this coffee to like, oh, and you just like kind of ease into it. And so we created this night mode thing on the shop. And depending on when you watch this, it's early 2026, it may be gone at that point.

(2:21 - 2:42)

But a lot of the products and brands and things that we purchase now, we put on our body, we interact with. This coffee cup, the Frick Collection, the museum, we became members this year in New York City. We are really connected to the brands with core values, the products with core values.

(2:42 - 3:12)

And so we're becoming very intentional about the things that we engage with, the people we interact with, the companies and brands that we connect with, and where we put our dollars, where we invest our energy, our money. Because when we spend money with a brand, that's an investment in them such that they can continue to produce the things that they produce. So if they're producing good things, then it's a self-reinforcing cycle.

(3:13 - 3:40)

If they produce bad things, that's a negative spiral and can take you down. You'll see stuff that we put up on the shop we actually believe in. And so none of this is sponsored or a cash grab.

It's real. It's authentic to us. So you can trust in that.

Same thing with these videos. So that's sort of the sleep. We're still in the building belief mindset.

(3:40 - 4:00)

And so as we switch into decision-making for these new financial infrastructure elements that are coming online, blockchain, Bitcoin, some alternatives. Bitcoin is now 16 years old. It was like January 3rd, 2009.

(4:00 - 4:15)

So we're almost at the 16-year point when it was created. And it was created with some strong core values that people really connected with. And that's why you've seen this take off and maintain its credibility and its authenticity over the years.

(4:15 - 4:50)

It wasn't just an empty vessel of empty money. It was truly embedding electricity into a monetary system that was hard and fortified and could be validated over time through these blocks. You can research more later.

And I've got a whole strategy background deck on this if you're interested. I'll include the link in the show notes here. But it really was about freedom and the ability to be self-sovereign.

(4:51 - 5:26)

And so because of that core value input into the atomic unit of that product, that belief system, it's maintained itself and it's not going away at this stage. And now you have sovereign wealth funds, major corporations, countries around the world investing in this. Because it started with the people.

It started at the one-on-one connection with another individual. And that belief system is what it's built on, truly. Bitcoin is built on a core value.

(5:26 - 5:47)

And so that is probably the best indication of a planetary scale product, system, technology, network, you name it, that's built with strong core values and it connects with people. So when you're building your thing, look at that. Look at the stuff that you're buying every day.

(5:47 - 6:26)

Does that match your core values? Does that represent who you are? When you wear that shirt, that cap, those glasses, the watch, whatever, the coffee cup you run around in, the phone you hold in your hand, it's signaling something about yourself to the external market. Similarly, as you flip that and you're creating a product or service or others, you have to think about what is your thing signaling for them to the rest of the world? And if that's signaling something bad, then it's going to dampen your growth. And you may never even get out of first gear on that thing.

(6:26 - 6:36)

You may never get past first base. You may never even get out of the batter's box. So I think with all this stuff, it just, again, comes back to core values.

(6:36 - 6:48)

So let's talk about this new financial infrastructure system. So we've gone very deep in this stuff over the years. We've got a background in econ, finance, math, yada, yada, monetary systems, incentives.

(6:48 - 7:21)

We used to design incentive systems for the boards, management teams, sales teams of a lot of the Fortune 1000 companies, which is interesting. We've actually written definitive 14A proxy statements, which gets filed with the SEC, advised a lot of companies. So it is a system of control in some way, but it's more of a like, how do we get a large group of people, say an organization of a million people to align? That's really difficult.

(7:22 - 7:33)

You can't have a conference call with a million people every day and sort of like direct them. So you have to use other and invent other mechanisms. And so compensation systems are a way for that.

(7:33 - 7:45)

So Bitcoin actually can function as not just like a monetary protocol where you're like paying for things back and forth, but almost a compensation incentive system as well. And then you can build things on top of it. It's a technology.

(7:45 - 7:58)

So it's like a platform as well. So we've got this new thing. It's called WISP, WISP.com, W-H-I-I-S-P.com. It's a Bitcoin lightning network all over the world.

(7:59 - 8:25)

And what it allows you to do is it allows tiny sub penny micropayments from yourself to someone else, from an AI agent to another AI agent, from literally any one thing to any other thing. Now, why do we need this? Well, we need it because the current monetary system can't manage small transactions. So below 50 cents, Stripe won't work.

(8:25 - 8:36)

ACH bank transfers won't work. Credit cards won't work. Like you're just going to be paying fees that, you know, doesn't make sense for you to have these small transactions.

(8:37 - 9:01)

So and you can do big transactions, too. I mean, you could transfer a billion dollars at the speed of electricity, the speed of the Internet to the other side of the world on this thing. But why small transactions? Well, our core hypothesis is that in the future and even today, there's going to be hundreds, thousands, millions, trillions of these small little AI programs.

(9:01 - 9:22)

Let's just call them small little programs that just do one small function, one little thing. And as you chain a lot of these little things together, each one needs to do a transaction. There's some exchange of value there, right? Like, hey, I want your program to do this small thing for me and give me back this thing and answer a task, whatever.

(9:22 - 9:36)

And so I'm willing to pay you 0.0000001 cent to do that. And I'm going to pay you that a billion times a second all over the world at scale. So you can't do credit cards like that.

(9:36 - 9:43)

That doesn't make sense. I mean, you're paying 25 cents every time you do that. So you've reached this fundamental limit.

(9:43 - 9:57)

And so you see these other companies like Stripe and, you know, Coinbase, they're like building their own blockchain. And it's just like, what are you doing, guys? Like, this is stupid. You already have Bitcoin, which is a network that's so large.

(9:57 - 10:06)

It's at Zeta hash scale. Zeta scale is all the grains of sand on the planet. Zeta scale is the width of the Milky Way galaxy.

(10:06 - 10:27)

Zeta scale is the number of water drops on our planet. And so you're not going to just build a new financial infrastructure from scratch that meets those needs today with just a closed set of 10 companies and financial institutions. It's another set of control.

(10:27 - 10:36)

So they are still hanging on to power as much as they can. And we just take a different approach. Like, the more you give away power, the more it comes back to you.

(10:37 - 10:45)

Ding, ding, quiz question. So you got to let go in this new market, this new economy. You got to let go with AI.

(10:45 - 11:04)

Like, it's a probabilistic system. You got to let go with this Bitcoin lightning networks because it's taken the path to least resistance. Whatever node is best positioned with the highest, lowest latency, highest throughput, shortest hop between two points on a network graph like a highway system.

(11:04 - 11:16)

And so you can't control always the pathway that it takes. So you got to relinquish control. And all these companies that are still trying to, like, hang on to control and, like, power and money, they're obsolete.

(11:17 - 11:26)

They don't know it yet. They're obsolete. And even these new Web3 companies are still in that same mindset, even though they came up through this new system.

(11:27 - 11:36)

And they still haven't gotten it. The philosophy, the core values of this thing, let go. Give it back to the people.

(11:36 - 11:42)

Let the universe and nature take hold. Look at this. This is perfect.

(11:43 - 11:52)

No one designed this. I mean, God, the universe, right? The laws of physics. But no one sat down with a pencil paper and said, like, you know what? We're a bank.

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And we're going to make a forest today. And we're going to draw it exactly like this. It's not how the universe works.

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So, you know, us humans, we like to put things in a box. I think we should put things in a tesseract or just, you know, let go and let nature take its course. So you have to become a philosopher and direct systems like a river, the flow of water, right? Rather than, like, trying to control everything, you have to let go and ride the waves.

(12:19 - 12:29)

You got to become a surfer rather than like a rote engineer building like a core set of train tracks. And it must follow this path. It's like, oh, maybe we can fly today.

(12:30 - 12:34)

Maybe we can take a river. Maybe we can walk a little bit. All right, we'll hop a train, yada, yada.

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So that's a little bit of an overview. We can go deeper later. And I just wanted to share that thought with you all today.

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So remember, we're still in belief situation. Enjoy your cup of coffee. Go look at some art.

(12:51 - 13:10)

Expand your mind. And think about building a product or service with core values, but in a way that relinquishes control such that your brand can help your customer signal the virtues that we all believe in to the rest of the market. And good things will happen.

(13:10 - 13:15)

The more you let go, the more it comes back to you. In droves, actually. So that's it.

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That's a bit of an intention for today. And I hope you have a great rest of your day. And step outside.

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Enjoy some of this. We'll talk to you later. Peace out, everybody.