WBD236 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin UX & Marketing with Dan Held

Interview date: Friday 19th June 2020

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Held from Kraken. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Dan Held the Director of Business Development at Kraken. We discuss the importance of easy user experience, how Bitcoin can be a daunting experience, self custody and why marketing matters.

“We each have independent narratives, in terms of how we talk about Bitcoin, but we’re each part of the same team and I think we all agree that our objective here is to convert as many people to Bitcoin as possible.”

— Dan Held

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Morning Dan. How you doing, man?

Dan Held: Doing well! Glad to be back on the show.

Peter McCormack: Yeah man, it's always good to have you back on the show. I don't know, was it like three or four times now? I can't even remember.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think it's quarterly. Pop on quarterly, typically have something kind of new to talk about and yeah, so I'm excited about today's conversation. It's something that you and I have talked about a lot, so it's going to be fun.

Peter McCormack: Well, it's something that gets me into trouble sometimes, and I think we might trigger a few people today, because we're going to talk about the big, bad word of marketing. But it's a really funny one, because I think marketing, as a term, or advertising scares people off, because they automatically assume it means something bad, like I'm trying to get you to drink a can of Coke or buy some shit you don't need in our life.

But I know, as much as anyone else, anyone creating a business, the marketing's really important. Also, I've always said marketing is important for Bitcoin, and people might not even want to admit it, but it is important. So I think you've got a similar feeling?

Dan Held: Yeah, I think in most Bitcoiner's minds, when they hear the word marketing, it's like this instant cringe where they have flashbacks of really cheesy YouTube thumbnail images combined with slicked back hair and an ICO website with great graphics, I think.

So there's a little bit of PTSD left over from Bitcoiners, where they typically associate great marketing with sleazy tactics and sometimes, in the crypto space, that does happen, because these different individuals need to use great marketing to draw in investors, to get people part of their project and to buy their coins. I understand where they're coming from, I understand that, but I think you can't just throw all marketing out because there's been a few bad apples.

Peter McCormack: Also all those people who probably hate marketing, don't realize that they engage in marketing themselves, don't realize that, even by talking to people about Bitcoin and waxing poetic about it and trying to convince that they're engaged in one aspect, the word of mouth aspect, which me, as a marketing guy, I know the Venn diagram of the paid and the... What was the third one? God, that's how long it's been. There's paid, and I don't know. Why can't I remember? But word of mouth is earned marketing, right?

It's an earned media channel, and people don't seem to understand that that is part of it. If you're trying to market something, you're trying to get people to talk about it. Something like the Serial podcast was a raging success through earned media. Rogan is a raging success because of earned media, he doesn't advertise, but he's done a great job. Well he does a good job on social as well, but he's done a great job with earned media, and I don't think people will understand it. But listen, you dived into this recently, you actually decided to do a whole Tweetstorm about it?

Dan Held: Yeah, so I've been in this space for over eight years now, and Bitcoin's marketing frankly sucks, it's really bad. The orange B, by the way, do you know how that was designed?

Peter McCormack: God, I imagine it's... Well didn't Craig Wright write it down and at a dinner party and show his brother or something?!

Dan Held: He scribbled it on a napkin or something, right? Got you! Okay, so a group of developers came up with what they thought were beautiful numbers. So they liked the RGB colour of orange because of the number, not because it was orange.

Peter McCormack: Shut up, is that true?

Dan Held: Yeah, that's true and how the B is angled represents a specific angle that they thought was cool mathematically.

Peter McCormack: I kind of like that.

Dan Held: I'm not shitting you! Sure, but just a couple, and people are like, "Oh, Bitcoin's logo is great" and I'm like, "Dude, it was literally designed by devs geeking out over weird math." Luckily, Bitcoin's such a strong product that it brushed off a lot of this really terrible marketing, like that orange B. There was actually a movement back in '13, '14, that I was a part of, where there was an alternative B. It was a B with a horizontal line through the bottom of it, a single horizontal line, and a designer created a website that said, "Hey, we need a better logo."

My first product, Zero Block, had that B, and quite a few other products in the space had that B at that time. A lot of people don't remember that because it's pretty old knowledge, but there was a movement to make a better B, and it was also Unicode character. If you think about it, the Bitcoin orange B is more of a nod to the U.S. dollar, right? There's all sorts of flaws with it. Anyways, so the logo is really poor. It wasn't really created with any sort of good insightful things, other than geeks nerding out on arbitrary information. No one was geeking out about like, "Oh, people like the colour orange." That was not how they chose that colour.

But also, you've got just really bad marketing all the way around. When I got in, in 2012, technically 2011, but 2012 I think is when I really started to engage, I found that Bitcoin-Qt was incredibly difficult to understand for a non-technical person and there's been this obsession in this space over developers, but people don't remember that, ultimately, humans interact with this thing. You have to make it understandable and easy to use. Back in the day, people would be like, "Oh, go read the Bitcointalk forum, it'll tell you everything you need.

There was no Medium articles, there were no podcasts, there were no videos. Well there was a couple videos, there was We Use Coins videos, but yeah just kind of a complete lack of any sort of empathetic thinking towards how will humans understand this. It's kind of been lacking for almost the entire existence. Even now, it's just now getting better.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well there's a bunch we can unpack here. It definitely still exists now without doubt, because I've been on the receiving end personally of quite a bit of shit for trying to challenge some of these ideas. I think what it is, I think it does come from that point. There's quite a difference between technical people and non-technical people. So for example, we might have discussed this on a previous show, but before all this Bitcoin craziness, I had a web agency. It was a digital agency, we built websites, we did search engine optimizations, email campaigns, and you had a very clear set of roles and jobs that people did.

You had your developers, who would do your PHP or your dot-net coding of the websites. But before they got to code anything, you had a UX designer design the experience, and that would go to a creative designer to create a layer on top, and all of that was usually facilitated by some kind of account or project manager. It was a really shitty job, because what they had to do is keep the designs true to what the designer wanted, because the designer never wanted any changes because it was their piece of art, keep the UX guy as happy as possible, because the UX guy would always stand by, "This is the best experience for what we're trying to achieve on conversion," ensure the client's happy, because the client always wants to poke and change things, and also have to deal with a developer, who ultimately never always wants to build exactly what they're given.

So you could give a full brief, you could give a full tech brief, full layouts, and when the developers start building things, they'll still do things their own way, so that person had a really tough job. But what I knew, from myself having done that role, and doing a couple of roles in there, is I knew that you could never trust a techie on the user experience. Now there are exceptions to the rule. You can have someone like Jack Mallers, who understands both dev and UX and design. He's great, but they are a unicorn, they're very rare. You very rarely would find somebody who had both. So the developers, you almost had to just really sit on them and say, "Just follow this" and at the same time, the designers could build shit.

Dan Held: I think that's where writing a really good scope of work, a really good brief and a design brief for designers and a good product spec to hand off to the devs, you have to really laser focus down on, what are we building? Why are we building this? How does it look? How does it function?

There's a rare few people that can... And these are what PMs are sort of for, is they zoom out and they look at the different people that helped build this and then they look at the stakeholders, the ones who will use it, the ones who are invested in building this product, and making sure that everyone's coordinated. A lot of people go, "Oh PMs, seems kind of like an easy position."

Peter McCormack: No way, it's a hard fucking job!

Dan Held: Yeah, it's like your being pulled in a 100 directions, and you have to be quasi-technical, design focused, strategy focused, UX focused, customer empathetic, so yeah, totally agree. Most devs don't have that capability of zooming all the way out and zooming all the way in, and neither do designers, that's sort of the PMs role, and they rarely zoom all the way out and go, "Oh, well, how are people interacting with my code? Not just from a code basis, but from a normal human layman in the street basis."

Peter McCormack: Also, I think the thing about PMs is, not only do they have to understand all of that, they also have to understand human incentives and incentive structures, like how do people make decisions. I think one of the difficulties, especially that I've come across with a lot of the techies maybe I've clashed with, it's not only they don't understand UX, they don't understand incentives and UX isn't just about on screen. If we were thinking of a product for a client and we're having to build some kind of web interface for it, the starting point isn't someone's going to the website.

What happens is, it's like our starting point is how do we even get them to think about the product, how do we get them to the website? We have to think about all of that, and this is where my massive battle with nodes, ongoing raging battle with nodes, which I 100% stand by that I am a 100% right about having the debate. I think the statistics back it up and I do think there's all these different leaps Dan. Leap one is, convince someone they should think about Bitcoin.

Dan Held: Right, totally!

Peter McCormack: They've thought about it and then convince them to buy it, but then convince them that they need to have something like a hardware wallet to store it, and then convince them that they need to go down the rabbit hole, and then convince them they need to run a node. There are a lot of leaps there.

Dan Held: Oh, totally.

Peter McCormack: There's a lot of people who've got all the way up to that one before the node, but still haven't run a node and the people who are fighting against me go, "Oh, but you don't run a node," I think they've completely missed the message of what I'm trying to say there.

Dan Held: Yeah, and I completely agree. Running a node is very difficult. I got the Casa Node, and the Casa Node, most people would consider as one of the easier to run nodes. I'm a really big fan of Jeremy and those guys over that built Casa and Jameson, but it was still hard. Look, in today's day, you want to be able to just press a button for it to work. You want an easy to understand interface, you want easy to understand error states and progress states, and this is all about communication.

That's what marketing really is about, it's about communication. It's not necessarily like sleazy, slicked back hair salesmen, a used car salesman. Marketing is about communicating to people and interfaces do that and ads do that. That's where a lot of people don't even know the role of a PMM, product marketing manager. Well the product marketing manager communicates to existing users, like through push notifications, emails, making them aware of new features and services within the product or communicating to them XYZ functionality that the product that they're currently engaging with, maybe there's a better way they can use it.

So people don't really think about marketing holistically, they bucket it in this weird little corner. To wrap that up with your node statement, nodes are extremely difficult for people to understand. What's the value prop? Why am I spending this money? Why isn't it easier to use? I think anything, other than Casa, can require a command line. I think even Casa required command line for a little bit. I don't know if you know the guys from Start9 Labs?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, funny you should say that. I think it's here, it's in my drawer here. I've got it, it's Embassy.

Dan Held: Yeah, the Embassy. These guys are awesome, man. Essentially a lot of people that I've talked to building nodes, the way they think about them are freedom boxes, and Start9 Labs I think really took that idea and ran with it. Are you going to pull it out there? Nice!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've got one. I've got to do something with this, right? I've been waiting for the guys, because I'm going to make a show with them. I think they're doing some cool shit.

Dan Held: Yeah, there's some really cool dudes there. I think they've got a company set up around this, but a lot of this is their own personal money, just like a pure work of passion to go build this, and it's a freedom box. It starts with a Bitcoin full node, but then they have like encrypted messaging, and they're going to roll out XYZ, the other feature as well. So I think nodes are an incredibly important part of Bitcoin and they're one of the first teams that are kind of serious around just laser focused on UX, where they're like, "Okay, how do we make getting a node stood up as easy as possible?"

So yeah, I think you have to have that focus, and that's where you just see a complete lack of UX and product thinking in this space. Any product person realizes, "If I'm building something for my customer, I have to make it easy to use, because that's going to maximize the number of people that find value from the product." Bitcoiners go, "LOL, you should learn how to code, bro" and you're like, "That's not the right attitude at all."

They're like, "Well if you don't want to spend the time to learn it, then maybe you shouldn't buy Bitcoin" and I'm like, "That's not appropriate." These interfaces are unnecessarily complicated. I do agree that if they don't want to learn about why Bitcoin's valuable, you can't force them to, but certainly, once they're ready to be activated as a Bitcoiner by owning Bitcoin and holding it and self custody, we should make that process as easy to understand and easy to do as possible, instead of going, "LOL, you should be more technical."

Peter McCormack: Dude, I've had a couple of experiences. So I had with Wasabi Wallet, people saying, "You've got to CoinJoin." So the first time I downloaded it, the very first thing, I was like, "No, this doesn't have a UX designer on it" because when I went to put in my password, rather than little stars, it had Chinese symbols, and I was like, "Oh, something's wrong with my keyboard," so I deleted it. So I assumed something was broken, because why am I getting Chinese symbols? They just decided, for whatever reason, they were going to get rid of what is the pre-agreed convention for passwords of showing stars to change it to Chinese symbols.

There's not a UX designer in the world worth their salt who would agree with that, so that was the first time. Anyway, I'll give them a pass. So I went into CoinJoin and the first time I looked, I was like, "I don't get it. What does that anonymity site mean? Anonymity site 50, what does that mean? What's it for?" So what you would really want to do is, you want to have a button that says, "CoinJoin now, press button." Then it's going to say something like, "Okay, what kind of anonymity set would you like? This is what an anonymity set is, this is what it means." Explain it.

Dan Held: Exactly!

Peter McCormack: Then you can choose, "This is where you deposit," and then almost two or three big buttons with explanations. I know that naturally and I also had it the other day, when I set up a Multisig for my Trump bet with Hodl. You know about this bet?

Dan Held: Yeah, it's 0.5 Bitcoin or something, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah and we used Caravan. It's very cool that it can be done, but absolutely no way that anyone, who's beyond the Bitcoin nerd, is going to be able to figure that shit out. But there is a market for a multisig, which is UX friendly, which is, "Create Multisig, connect wallet, done." Everything's there straightaway, you don't have to worry about that shit, and that's what will take the leap from being a nerd toy to being for everyone, else, all Bitcoin will ever be for everyone else is something they buy on Kraken or Coinbase and they store in a hardware wallet.

Dan Held: Totally! People go, "Oh, we have to push people to self-custody" and I'm like, "Yes, that is a noble and true cause that we should always be fighting for." But I find it extremely disingenuous to recommend that this user, this new user, immediately learn how to work with private keys and store their pneumonic. Eric Savics was a great example. Couple weeks ago, Eric came out that he had gotten fished.

Peter McCormack: The KeepKey thing?

Dan Held: Yeah, where he plugged it in, and there was a Chrome extension I think, a malicious Chrome extension he had downloaded, and he was decently knowledgeable about private key management and Bitcoin. He even had a YouTube channel, where he had explained videos on Bitcoin. So the guy was pretty knowledgeable, right? It's easy to slip up. Honestly, I'm just surprised I haven't gotten hacked and/or lost my Bitcoins over the years and that's where I have heard stories of my buddies in the space losing their Bitcoin, because of their private key management practices.

So Bitcoiners screech at me for going, "You can't not recommend self-custody" and I'm like, "Well, yeah, I'm not going to recommend it until they're ready." I think we should always be pushing them that direction and reinforcing that narrative that they should self-custody, but it's really dangerous. You're giving a loaded gun to someone and if they don't know how to use it, then they're going to shoot themselves in the foot.

I guess there's no use for self-custody if they don't know what they're doing. They're going to lose their Bitcoins, then they're going to turn into a salty no-coiner, because they're going to lose their coins and be like, "Oh, this is a scam." Yeah, I just think it's in really poor taste, and just... I don't know, I think it's a really insulting to the population, to just tell them like, "Hey, you should be more technical," and it's like, "Cool, man." I'm still nervous about my private key management set up after eight years. I'm still nervous about it.

Peter McCormack: Well that's why I've gone Casa Multisig myself, just because I'm totally nervous about it. But it's funny you should say that, because my dad lives in Ireland and it was funny. Recently, I had to set him up on Zoom for his golf club, and had to get him to use Zoom. I had to teach him how to use copy and paste! He still didn't what that was, and this is a guy whose job was to keep airplanes in the sky. But every time I go to his house, he has a list, every single time. "Can you fix this with my computer? Can you fix this with my TV?"

He just doesn't get this shit. If he wanted to be a Bitcoiner, there must be a way of measuring the risk of him losing his coins himself, or I don't know, a custody solution losing them and I would say my father is infinitely more likely to lose his coins than the custody solution. I think everyone should self-custody, I am a 100% with you on this, but I also understand that some people will fuck it up, and my father's a prime example. All these people who want to go to a Bitcoin based world, a Bitcoin based economy, they're not accounting for the fact there are a lot of people who struggle with the technical hurdles of that. So some people will need that bridge, some people will need that support and help.

Dan Held: Yeah, or if they use CoinJoins, you can ruin your privacy afterwards if you start to combine them again. There's almost no explainers on there about that, like in Wasabi Wallet or Samurai or anything. I've only seen the Wasabi interface and have interfaced with that a bit. But yeah, there's not a lot of explanations. People forget that on-chain privacy, whether it be with Zcash, Monero or Bitcoin, there's many more factors to being private, like all of the things associated with a transaction, the time you did it, there's also the metadata too, what you do with the coins after, so I think people forget that these are such technical things you need to cover.

That's what's so hard about communicating about it, is you need to cover all these edge cases and you need to cover deep technical aspects of how it works, but also make it easy to understand. I don't know if many people know this, but there was a working group, put together in 2018, and it was IDEO Labs. So IDEO run by Dan Elitser on the Blockchain side, and he actually pulled together some pretty huge head of design of XYZ Crypto company, pulled them together to work on standard issues.

So these standard issues would be like, what's an unconfirmed transaction? What does that mean? When I'm a user, I'm like, "What the fuck? Unconfirmed? Wait, did it fail?" Why do we use the term unconfirmed? It's just because it was in the legacy code base. For human understandable interfaces, you have to have something like processing or propagated.

Peter McCormack: Well you add to that Dan, also, because a confirmed transaction is actually binary, it's either no confirmations or has confirmations. But some places will accept a spend on one confirmation. I know Sportsbet I work with, and I think Bitrefill potentially may be zero confirmations. Some places are six, so then you have to say, "Well, it depends, but the general agreement is six confirmations is when it's confirmed, they wanted six confirmations." Well basically, we're talking about six blocks. But what are the blocks? "Well, every 10 minutes, a block is created." What the fuck? I mean, come on.

Dan Held: Totally! Yeah, that's where I don't believe many people in the future will transact on layer one. I think it'll be reserved to a highly technical group that is focused on self-sovereignty and people will have access to Bitcoin and the value it brings, and the threat that they could move it off of these centralized venues to their own self custody, I think is a big threat to the existing system as well. Again, I do believe that people should do self-custody, and I think that's the entire value of Bitcoin, is being your own bank, that's huge.

But certainly, we'll see. Then that's where, maybe with Multisig, I think Multisig is a good UX middle ground. With that, I don't have to trust a single counterparty, but I could trust multiple, and the probability that they would all collude is very, very low. But then it also reduces the damage from my own self custody set up, because it's hard for me to mess that up when other people have the key as well.

So I think Multisig is kind of the solution for this in the future, but we are a magnitude off in UX around Multisig. Also, two out of three Multisig is pretty dangerous. As soon as you lose one key, you have to do a key ceremony again and so I don't think that's exactly elegant either, maybe three out of five, I thought was kind of cool, three out of five or more keys than that. Anyways, we could go down the UX path for a while, but I think we're talking mostly today about marketing.

Peter McCormack: But they're the same thing. We always did marketing and UX together, and I think they're the same thing, because what we're talking about is, even with the marketing is part of the UX, the experience of getting someone from outside of Bitcoin into Bitcoin, to understand Bitcoin, to be a solid responsible Bitcoiner and that is an entire journey, of which marketing performs one piece, but it's like this overall position.

Do you know what, Dan? I wrestle with it. This lack of tolerance sometimes towards people who are new and understanding, or might not be technically gifted, who are trying to navigate this stuff. But then I'm like, "Is the lack of tolerance a good thing? Because it forces you" and ultimately, I end up coming back to, I don't think it's useful. I actually think it's a little bit of technical elitism.

Dan Held: Yeah, it's definitely a form of elitism. I think there are some immovable things in Bitcoin, like the 21 million hard cap, and because of that fierce resiliency around that never changing, Bitcoiners then believe that over into other areas of about Bitcoin. So I totally get it. In some areas it's very much justified, but the whole people should be more technical aspect, I just don't agree with that sort of philosophy. It is elitism, it's kind of arrogant and if you're a product person...

Peter McCormack: Some people are wired that way.

Dan Held: Yeah, some people just aren't going to get it man. Look, I understand we can't make it perfect for grandma. She's just never going to get it, no matter how much time we spend on it, but at least we should strive to make it as easy as possible to convert everyone we can. There's no reason to keep it technical arbitrarily. We should continue to strive to make it easier to understand, easier to use, and when we do that, we get more Bitcoiners in the top of the funnel, we have more of them convert into being node runners and self-custody key holders.

So I think they don't understand this from a marketing perspective in terms of a growth funnel. We're trying to get new users in, activate them, keep them around, and have them become referrals or have them become advocates of the product. Instead, we're like, "Here's a super technical way to get in," which reduces the amount of people coming in, less people find value in it, and then we go, "Cool," and then you can only talk about it in terms of prophesying about Bitcoin if you adhere to XYZ fixed set of narratives.

Peter McCormack: The funnel is really interesting actually. I'm glad you talk about that, because when you talk about the funnel, you identify something I purposely do. Whilst I love making my show, it's not a hobby. It's a business, and ultimately if it doesn't make money and a profit, then I have to get a job, which means I can focus less time on it. So I have to think about it as a business, and I always have to look at what other people are doing and differentiate myself and are they competitors or not?

I look at Pomp, I see what he's doing, and he's Bitcoin, but he does some other coin stuff and he also does non-Bitcoin stuff, non-crypto in his show and more finance and I look at something like what Marty and Matt Odell do, which is brilliant. I love what they do, but I also think they're more show for the industry. If you're a techie or developer, you're going to love that show, because they talk about all the things that are going on, updates to things, developments in the industry, if there's a new technology, updates, they do all that there, which I think, if you're industry based, you're going to love that.

Then I look at what I do, and I think what I want to do is sweep up all the people who've got like an hour or two a day when they're on the train, they want to know a little bit about Bitcoin and they're like, "Oh, I've heard deflation's bad" and they hear my show, "Okay, deflation isn't so bad." They've heard about Libertarianism, they'll hear me talk to you or someone else, like Erik Voorhees, and I get it. I'm trying to scoop up the wide group of people.

I see someone, like Stephan, in the middle and it's lucky we have all these great shows doing different things, but I think a show like my show, which probably is the least credible amongst Bitcoiners, but has the most people listen, it does that job of kind of sweeping everyone up and bringing them into that funnel. Where do they go from there?

Dan Held: Right, you're more top of the funnel, which is more around the awareness and consideration stage. You also have Bitcoiners, like myself, who listen to the show. So we're more advanced, but in a sense, your audience, they listen to you because you break things down simply, you're kind of frank about it, you bring on great guests, and I think a lot of Bitcoiners think only good marketing exists for the bottom of the funnel.

Tales from the Crypt with Marty Bent and Matt Odell, everyone loves that, because it covers what everyone needs to hear, self-custody, privacy etc. That's the true shit about what Bitcoin's about! That is truly seizing your self-sovereignty and so I have huge respect for that.

Peter McCormack: But I couldn't do that by the way, because I'm not good enough. I'm not techie enough and I don't understand it enough. I'm better at asking the confused questions.

Dan Held: Yeah, these guys are pros. They're the pros that dig in on it, they've been around Bitcoin for a while, they're fiercely independent and I think that's phenomenal, that's exactly what Bitcoin is. But I think there's equally virtuous, as being top of the funnel, doing something like you do and Pomp does, which is bring people in and have them become aware of Bitcoin and consider it as a new money. Then further down the funnel, you have Marty and Matt, and they convert them from being aware about Bitcoin, to maybe now they have bought Bitcoin.

Now they take them and turn them into very resilient, very independent, truly fierce Bitcoiners, who have custody of their own coins, they run a full node, and they're doing CoinJoins. Neither one is more or less virtuous, it's all part of the same system, where it's sort of a relay race. You're handing off the baton to someone further down the funnel as you've gotten them further through it. Now some people are full stack.

I'm creating some sort of an arbitrary sort of slicing here, just for easy officialization, but someone can certainly be full stack, and if you look at exchanges, they're sort of doing that as well. Exchanges produce content, which is around when people perform a query like, "What is Bitcoin?" Or, "Buy Bitcoin." They're going to do classic SEO techniques to rank their landing pages for that specific query, rank those highly. So when users search for that, they find that. They provide explanation around some of the Bitcoin and crypto basics, and then hopefully that conversion leads to them creating an exchange account, which then brings the exchange money.

So everyone in this space is competing to take newbies and have them become aware of Bitcoin enough to buy Bitcoin, and then post buying Bitcoin, a lot of us are advocating for them to seize their self-sovereignty through running the full node and maybe doing their own private keys. So we're all part of the same marketing team. We each have independent narratives in terms of how we talk about Bitcoin, but we're each part of the same team, and I think we all agree that our objective here is to convert as many people into Bitcoin as possible.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think that also works on some of the political and ideological stuff that sits alongside Bitcoin as well. Do you get Marty's email?

Dan Held: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's fucking great! But Marty is fully wired into the problems with governments, the problems with central banking, but there are people who've never even considered that. There are people who've come from a position of never even thinking of challenging the ideas around essentially two party politics, or these ideas of Libertarianism, and I start at that point, asking the difficult questions, "But yeah, but what would happen if X was to happen?” Or “I don't understand what happens with the roads."

That's a shitty example, but I'm always trying, and people are like, "You still don't fucking get it after all this time" and it's like, "No, my show was always going to be for new people." There's always going to be new people coming in, so I'm always going to ask those questions, even if I know the answers, because we need to keep people in that funnel coming through that funnel. So it isn't just the tech, it's the whole political ideology that sits behind it.

Dan Held: Yeah, exactly. I'm a big Libertarian. That's where, when I found Bitcoin, I was already Libertarian, so for me, it was easy. I'm like, "All right, sure. This makes sense, I get it". But I know that my journey was an unique one. This wasn't a journey where I think anyone could fall into this journey. Look, I'm a Texan, so Texans in general are Libertarian, but Texans are still conservative. They may not believe in full legalization of drugs, which I do.

They may not really understand a new digital currency, which I did, or like a new gold, which I did. They don't understand torrenting or encryption or any of that. Then on the west coast and east coast, they might be more open minded socially, but they're fiscally liberal, which means that they believe in taking away your money.

That's where the Libertarians, I kind of feel like we're in this weird spot, where I dislike each party equally in the United States and people want to feel like they belong, and so to be a Libertarian required you to be okay with not getting along with everyone, which kind of sucks, because it's like, "Hey guys, actually we believe the most in getting along with letting everyone do what the hell they want."

That's socially liberal and fiscally conservative, but fiscally conservative just means do whatever you want with your money, and socially liberal means do whatever you want with your body. But that concept though, like full legalization of drugs, it's completely intuitive. People very much believe in the propaganda generated by the government around why certain laws exist, why we do certain things.

So for them to challenge the sanctity and authority of the government, I don't think that's an easy task to get people to do. You're asking them to not believe in God, you literally pledged this state, like you did the Pledge of Allegiance in America, you actually pledge, you put your hand over your heart and you commit to that country every day in the morning in school in America.

Peter McCormack: Well it's Stockholm Syndrome, right?

Dan Held: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's Stockholm Syndrome. I had 38 years of never hearing of Libertarianism. Well hearing of it, but not paying any attention, and then I hear of anarcho capitalism and knowing enough about it. So my view is that it's just the way it was. It's just the way it is and always is, and for somebody to come out of that position, it doesn't happen overnight. You don't suddenly go, "Oh wait, I suddenly get it. I'm now fully anti-state, everything is terrible, we should be completely free." You don't just suddenly get that.

I also use that defense for people who are shit coiners as well. I think it's a very unique person who discovers cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, and instantly gets Bitcoin is king and everything else is shit. I think you have to go through a process of learning, and perhaps there, even though I'm empathetic towards it, a lack of tolerance also helps with pushing people towards that perhaps.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think any Bitcoiner has touched other coins. I mined Primecoin, this was back in 2014, because I'm like, "Primecoin is doing something useful, in addition to proof of work," which is ridiculous now, but back in that day, it sounded rational. I liked prime numbers because they weren't exactly deterministic, so it's like, it made sense and I mined Primecoin. It was kind of fun. That was the only thing I've ever mined, only coin I've ever mined. I actually mined a whole block, that was pretty fun. It was interesting.

I sold it immediately for some Bitcoin, and for example, I day traded some Litecoin, it was fun too. I'm not sure many people know this, but my old roommate was like number 10 at Ripple, so we did a consulting project for them in early '13, and I took all those Ripples as either Bitcoin or sold them all for Bitcoin. I don't think any Bitcoiner goes in... There might be a sizable chunk that are coming in and never touch anything else, but I was always a Bitcoiner.

For me, the digital gold narrative made total sense, so I bought and held it for that. I did dapple with other things, just to mess around with it. I never sold my stack to go buy that stuff. If it was the consulting gig or mining it, I was like, "Sure, okay" or I'd put a little bit of play money on a Litecoin or something, but it was never like, "Oh, I'm switching my whole stack over," or something like that. Past 2014, that just kind of solidified, because there was an altcoin bubble in 2014.

People don't remember that, but there was a big altcoin bubble in 2014, where Dogecoin came around and others, and Primecoin, there was PureCoin, and after that moment, that just kind of solidified for me why Bitcoin's the only thing. I kind of dappled with everything else, none of it really made a lot of sense, and then learning more and more about Bitcoin over the years, as you learn more about Bitcoin, it's just really hard to get excited about other things, because you realize that there's extreme design trade offs made when building a Blockchain, and Blockchains aren't a multi-purpose tool, they're a special purpose tool.

So yeah, I think a lot of Bitcoiners are inflexible in terms of it's Bitcoin only, but I think it's coming from a good place where it's going, "Look, trust us. The people have been around them for a while." I've seen 10,000 cryptocurrencies come and go, people are free to buy and sell whatever they like, but personally, I just don't see it.

Peter McCormack: All right man, well listen, we should talk a bit more about marketing. It's an interesting area, because I mean, I don't know about you, I'm in a bunch of Telegram and WhatsApp groups, and I just spend a lot of my day trying to ignore them because they're very distracting, but I also know whether it's on Twitter or listening to podcasts, a lot of the work Bitcoiners are doing is, Bitcoiners talking to Bitcoiners about Bitcoin, which is cool if it sweeps up some people. It's cool if somebody's researching it and then they stumble across it.

But actually, my head space is, "How do I get to more people?" Not only creatively and career-wise and ambition, wanting to grow, but I also want to bring people into Bitcoin, and not just because I want my Bitcoin to go up, but actually because I think it has a noble purpose. So I always think of things, Defiance was that first step. It's like, "How do I get to more people?" Another logical step for me, a really logical one, is to take Bitcoin out of my show title. If I was to not have What Bitcoin Did, which by the way, is a small career risk, because it's such a strong brand within the space, but really, if people would turn around to their friends and say, "Oh, you need to check it out."

People come on my show and they go and search and they see What Bitcoin Did. That might be like, "Ah." They might not want to listen to it, because I personally think Bitcoin has a reputation problem and the reason I think it has a reputation problem is, I've brought this up a couple of times, when people say about, "Oh, there's talk about mass adoption," I'm like, "But we have mass awareness." I never meet somebody whose not heard of Bitcoin nowadays. Wherever I go, it can be in an airport, grabbing a drink at the bar, and talk to somebody and they're like, "Oh, what do you do?" "I'm a podcaster." "What's it about?" "Bitcoin." They never say, "What's Bitcoin?"

They go, "I've heard of that." Very occasionally they've not, but they've heard of it, but they've never bought it. So there is a reason that people have heard about Bitcoin, and there's a reason they've not taken that step, and effectively, they haven't heard enough about it, they haven't had the pain, they've had a bad experience, they've got a friend whose had a bad experience, but we have mass awareness. We don't have mass adoption, and I almost think there's this category of things. It's like veganism, crossfit, and Bitcoin. They all kind of go together and those things are like, "Oh, you're one of those. You're a Bitcoiner."

Dan Held: Oh yeah, totally.

Peter McCormack: And how do we bridge that now?

Dan Held: Yeah, so with Bitcoin, we are part of this decentralized marketing team, where each one of us crafts our own narrative to how to pitch Bitcoin. So we can back home for Thanksgiving, if you're in the U.S., that's a primarily U.S holiday, or some holiday in the fall and winter, you go back and you hang out with your family and you're at the table, the dining table. It's a classic conversation, and they're like, "So tell us about Bitcoin." We each have our own pitch.

There isn't a standardized template here. We each give our own pitch, and that eventually converts people into it and we do that as well across social media channels. We got on YouTube and Twitter, Twitter being the really popular one in the crypto space, and we go out and we talk about Bitcoin. We talk about Bitcoin in terms of gold 2.0, some people talk about from a payment's perspective, some people talk about XYZ, and part of that, we have to think about, "How do I land that narrative?" That narrative, you can kind of think about it as its inception.

You're trying to incept the idea of Bitcoin into someone's head, and we have to look around where we can propagate that narrative, which is across many different channels, both in-person and digitally, so across social media, but then delivery the right payload, that right narrative, and it has to be the right time, at a right size. It has to have all these different functions that I think a lot of people just assume, "Oh, we can have one blanket statement, and if it's not on Twitter, they're not relevant" and I've been pushing really hard for this with some Bitcoin Telegram chat rooms, where I'm like, "Look guys, it's not okay for us to just pat ourselves on the back and be like cool, I got a 1,000 favorites on my Tweet today," which happens to me every day.

I'm primarily talking to Bitcoiners. I cross most of my content on LinkedIn, I cross most of my content on Reddit, and I'm about to go launch a YouTube channel. I'm trying to propagate Bitcoin's narrative everywhere I can in different formats, because the way people talk on LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit or YouTube is different, and to switch context between those social media channels and generate content that will resonate is actually really hard to do. You have to change your mind. I understand crypto Twitter intimately, I think that's not really up for debate.

I understand what narratives people like and what format, but changing that and making that payload changeable so we change the size of it and move it and twist it a little bit, and then we propagate that across a new channel, this is what we should be thinking about, is how do we get the message of Bitcoin everywhere we can? Crazier ideas, like billboards, I know there's a famous artist in the space that's looking at doing that.

Peter McCormack: Who would that be?

Dan Held: I can't say man, I forget if this individual has made it public or not.

Peter McCormack: All right, fair enough.

Dan Held: That's why I'm being stealthy about it. But how do we land that message about Bitcoin at the right time, right place, right message?

Peter McCormack: Well you said to me the other day, have you listened to the Rogan interview with Bret Weinstein this week?

Dan Held: It's literally a tab that I have open, but I haven't listened to it yet.

Peter McCormack: Do that! It's so good, and people will just like it. I think it's so good. I think it's good for two reasons, because you've got Weinsteinm the professor, the really super smart dude, figuring this shit out, looking at everything unemotionally, objectively, because what's happening right now was definitely a follow on for what happened to Evergreen College with him. Then you've got Rogan, who's like the normal guy. The guy probably flunked college and all that bullshit, doesn't care, like shoots guns, eats meat, but they're both debating it, so they're covering both areas.

What Rogan does is get him to explore it in a way that anyone can understand. So they're having this whole conversation about what's going on, and they're nailing the problems, absolutely fundamentally nailing the problems. But where I think it came unstuck is where Brett comes up with a solution, and his solution for bad politics was more politics. It was a suggestion on two more candidates. Again, an interesting suggestion, but it's more politics, and I was just sitting there going, "Fucking Bitcoin needs to be in this conversation." They don't even need to say Bitcoin.

They need to say, "Fix the money." Let's identify the problems, where the problems are. The problems are with the money. Why are there problems with the money? What do the problems with the money lead to? Why is there unrest? What's going on here? Then I was like, "Shit, perhaps that's what I need to do on my show." My show needs to be one where I start getting these people on and having these conversations, but then I need the show not be called What Bitcoin Did.

But one of the funny things is Dan, if I rebrand my show and call it The McCormack Show, just say I did that, I know what's going to happen. People are going to go, "Oh, you've given up on Bitcoin. You sold out. It's all about you now." Where it's like, "No! I can't expand the conversation because the name is a barrier. So let's get rid of the name, then more people will come in, and then let's have that conversation." Where do you get this?

Dan Held: Imagine if your show was called MMT. As soon as people see that word, it's a trigger word, and they're either going to be like, "Yes, I agree," or, "No, I don't." But if it's just The McCormack Show, they're like, "Interesting. Well, he talks about cool topics, maybe I'll give him a listen."

So I totally get what you're thinking about in terms of your brand for your show, and it's crazy that, when people go through this branding exercise, they want you to socially signal that you’re part of a tribe, like Bitcoin. Bitcoin, for me, is going to be a lifetime passion, so I don't mind that it's heavily associated with me.

But eventually, some day, I'd like to talk about, for instance, I worked in the drone industry for a brief moment and built a popular mobile app called Hover, which was downloaded by 25% of U.S. drone pilots. I don't really talk about it because it's not a clean cohesive narrative, because it's just easier just to focus on my other experiences. Now I like drones, I like cryopreservation, I like cryonics and I've signed up with Alcor.

Peter McCormack: Have you?

Dan Held: Yeah, which you'd be surprised. But I've had a bunch of Bitcoiners reach out to me and say they are as well. Hal Finney's cryo-preserved too.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know that. Well, what's the deal there? How much did it cost?

Dan Held: Well you can sign up with life insurance, and then you have them be the beneficiary, so it's actually reasonably affordable via that method. If it's lump sum, it's expensive.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what the lump sum is, just out of interest?

Dan Held: Between $120,000 and $200,000.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of money to come back from the dead.

Dan Held: Let's put it this way, if you don't do cryopreservation, your chance of coming back is 0%.

Peter McCormack: Okay, wow. Well, not 0%, because there might be some reincarnation, because I've thought about this. If you go down the rabbit hole of afterlife, so if you fundamentally 100%, believe you die and that's it, fine. I thought about this, the cryogenic stuff, they cryo-freeze you after you've died.

Dan Held: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So what happens if there is some weird afterlife? Do you suddenly get sucked back out of that?

Dan Held: It's a good question and the same question would exist for when your heartbeat stops. Do you immediately go to this afterlife and then come back when they bring you back? There's also been people who have plunged into very, very cold water. So we have evidence that cryonics... And we see animals do the same thing. Some animals go into this cryo-preserved state, in a way, if you will. I'm over using the term cryo, maybe like a biostasis. So we see animals do this.

We've seen this happen for a few minutes on very rare occasions. There's I think a Finnish or Norwegian skier, and she's skiing across a lake, and she fell through the ice. This was in the winter, so she fell through the ice and drowned, and they fished her out after 20 minutes and her heart had stopped. They pulled her out, got the water out of her lungs, warmed her body up, and then resuscitated her. She had no brain damage.

Peter McCormack: Shut the fuck up.

Dan Held: Yeah, so this, we have seen...

Peter McCormack: Did she have any weird memories, any weird shit that went on?

Dan Held: I think she had to be rehabilitated over a year, so I don't think it's without consequences here, but it's impressive to see what the body does and how cooling down the body preserves different states. There's also a new approved more experimental tech for trauma victims. So what they do is, it's called induced hypothermia, where let's say you have like five gunshot wounds, you're in a very serious state. So what they do is, they bring your body temperature below, what is it, like 98.6. 

So they put you into induced hypothermia and your body starts to really slow down. Everything slows down a lot. They slow your body down, they fix the damages that are super traumatic, and then they bring you back, and that induced hypothermia reduces your heartbeat, your caloric intake, your energy levels, how fast everything moves essentially, and your body slows down to a crawl. Puts you in sort of like a stasis if you will. They eventually looked at this as well for space travel. I think it's called induced torpor, where NASA did a study around this, where you can put people in induced hypothermic states for up to two weeks at a time and it would reduce the payload considerations for space travel to Mars by like one-third because you would have reduced oxygen and food consumption.

Peter McCormack: Wow! Listen, dude. What if you get cryo-frozen, and then there is like a reincarnation, and you end up in this next life and you're absolutely fucking crushing it? Then in the previous life, they restore you and bring you back, you can be pretty pissed. Also, what happens when you come back? Is it like when you leave prison? They give you an envelope with all the shit you had.

Dan Held: Yeah, you actually have a locker where you store your stuff.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you do?

Dan Held: Yeah, you do, and you want to set up a trust as well to oversee funds through time, the idea being that, when you come out, it'll be nice to have a little chunk of money that has grown without using the trust.

Peter McCormack: Even your Bitcoin, because there might've been a currency collapse.

Dan Held: Yeah, there's a group, kind of before Bitcoin, it's sort of like the Cypherpunks, but they're called the Extropians.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I remember them.

Dan Held: Yeah, the Extropians were kind of life extension folks. I think that's the easier, more modern, more well known term, looking at how you live forever and stuff like that. It's kind of funny, I guess I like to go tackle big problems, where I like to think about the two things that were formerly insolvable, death and taxes. Well maybe they can both solved with Bitcoin and cryo.

Peter McCormack: Is cryo inevitably solvable?

Dan Held: Yes.

Peter McCormack: It's inevitably solvable?

Dan Held: Yes, it's a physics problem. It's about preservation of the information in your brain, which is what your consciousness is.

Peter McCormack: But it's not really about preservation? It's about restoration without damage, because the cryogenic process does preserve it?

Dan Held: Well if you think about this way, the human brain is constantly degrading. You have brain cells dying every single second, and you have new memories being encoded via this experience right now, you and I talking, new memories encoded on your brain, while the old memories decay. Your recollection of your first bicycle ride is slowly fading away, but that doesn't make you any less of you. You are the continuity and compression of those experiences.

That really represents who you are. So do I need to preserve a brain 100%? Probably not. What's the level where we could say that consciousness has been preserved? We don't know. All we know is that preserving it as well as we can is the KPI, and eventually we'll figure out what that threshold is, but you don't have to have it a 100% perfect, due to our consciousness isn't about a 100% of our brain. Let's say you had a traumatic incident and you lost a part of your brain. That doesn't necessarily mean that you've lost your consciousness. Now, is it 51%? Is it 60%? We don't know. Is it 49%?

Or maybe it's a region in the brain. So these things are really, really deep questions to ask around cryo, but cryo fundamentally is a basic physics problem. Ralph Merkle, who I've actually grabbed lunch with, he's the guy who invented Merkle Trees, he's on the board of Alcor, and he's like, "Yeah, it's a really simple physic's thing." He's like, "Is the information preserved?" That's it.

Peter McCormack: And is it a case they won't know until they're able to defrost someone and find out?

Dan Held: That's right. Yeah, what is the appropriate level of preservation? We don't know. But certainly your chances of coming back without being cryo-preserved is about 0%. So doing this gives you a better than 0% chance. I don't know if it's .001% or 10%.

Peter McCormack: So what's the deal? There's certain deaths that screw this up, right? If you're out skiing and you fall off a cliff, no sense in preserving you. You're kind of fucked up.

Dan Held: Yeah, certainly duration matters immensely here. Hal Finney had a phenomenal cryo preservation, where he was right next door to the facility. So it's actually a little bit weird, but if they are there when you die, they actually keep you quasi-alive. Okay, what traditional medical science does is, they declare you dead because you are unrecoverable with existing medical technology, but your brain is not dead.

They're just like, "Look, even if we brought him back, we wouldn't be able to really treat them properly, so we just let them die." That is sort of the state of things. It's more of giving up. So technically, when you die, what Alcor does, if you have a really good cryo procedure, is they bring you to the facility immediately, but they have a chest thumper that keeps your heart and circulation going. So technically, it's more of a gradient process. You don't technically... Information theoretically... Necessarily die. You've been pronounced dead, but they keep circulation going and start to do intravenous mixtures to begin the process.

Peter McCormack: And what do they keep you in, like a big tube?

Dan Held: So yeah, maybe we split this off as a separate episode, but this is not...

Peter McCormack: Dude, I'm so into it. No, I think people will love this.

Dan Held: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I've kind of been holding back on talking about it, just because, let's put it this way, the UX of signing up is terrible. The UX of signing up for cryo, the way you start, there's not even a sign up button on the website. You have to find a 20 page membership form and fill that out and email it in.

Peter McCormack: What the fuck? Because it's probably the Bitcoin world.

Dan Held: It reminds me very much of early Bitcoin, just immensely hard, impossible UX, and overly jargonny. But yeah, I think it's super interesting. When I got into Bitcoin, it was really niche. I was one of the only non-technical people in the space back in that day, and with cryo, I see a similar sort of thing, where there's really an Overton window around it, an acceptable conversation around it. It's got a really weird stigma to it. It's very amateur, extremely amateur even. The number one company in the space, Alcor, only has an annual budge of $1.5 million dollars.

Peter McCormack: What if they run out of money?

Dan Held: They've got a trust, but $1.5 million... That's a rounding error on one startup in Silicon Valley and it solves a problem that everyone has. People don't want to die, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that creates a new problem.

Dan Held: How so?

Peter McCormack: If people aren't dying, we're going to run out of space.

Dan Held: Oh, you're not going to stack these people in your apartment or something. You put them in a facility in the middle of nowhere.

Peter McCormack: No, but in the future if we don't have death, we have a scaling problem.

Dan Held: Kind of. If you look at really developed countries, typically the population actually turns negative, like in Italy and Russia and those countries, their population growth is actually negative. So most people don't have two kids nowadays, after you reach level of per capita income. Kids are expensive and kids take a lot of upkeep. I think in developing countries, they're kind of used as labourers.

Peter McCormack: They are in my house.

Dan Held: Yeah, maybe all countries.

Peter McCormack: "Put the bins out. Make me a cup of tea, you little fuck!" Sorry, I was going to say, there's a really good rabbit hole. We could have done a show on that ourselves, but I'm conscious of time. I just want to bring it full circle. How do we get this in the conversation? How do we get this in the wider conversation, get people talking about it? Because we've got some well known people who know a bit about it, like Nassim Taleb.

He understands Bitcoin, and he had a winge the other day, when he couldn't buy some shit on Coinbase. So he had a reason to buy then, and we've got the Raoul Pals and Dan Tapeiros all coming in, we've got Preston Pysh, but we need some bigger names, some bigger people to really give a shit.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think when Bitcoiners think about cycles and how new user adoption works, it's typically number go up is what brings everyone in. The big bull runs, everyone wants to take advantage of the bull run and profit from it, which is totally intuitive, as people can't resist the urge to make money. But then the floors, the bottom of the cycle, is set by the the believers. So to get people in, we need to maximally compress the narrative.

We need up to come up with the easiest way to explain Bitcoin to a variety of different audiences, and that's where each one of us, we each are a member of Bitcoin's marketing team. We each need to think about how we talk about Bitcoin, but more importantly, don't just talk about it, put it out there, and you find no traction, and then you continue down that course. Use data driven framework for going, "Okay, I talked about Bitcoin this way, and now I'm seeing people's eyes light up."

I think a common narrative around me is like, "Dan explains Bitcoin simply" and it's funny, because I've actually had people in-person where they're like, "Hey Dan, convince my friend to buy Bitcoin," like in-person, when we're at dinner and I'm like, "Look, I can't just auto-magically convert anyone into Bitcoin."

Peter McCormack: Tell me what you just did there. Tell me that sentence and say, "Convince me that you shouldn't buy Bitcoin."

Dan Held: Ah, nice! Well there you go, that'll be your trick.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to try that now.

Dan Held: You should try that, yeah, that's good. I think of it as like a deck of cards. You can play a different card for different people. If it's a boomer, if you start talking about crazy digital things, they're just not going to get it. You talk to them about gold, they get gold. You talk to a millennial or a zoomer, they're going to respond differently to different messaging, like, "Oh, Bitcoin's about freedom" Alex Gladstein esq, or like, "This is about consensual money." That sort of verbiage I think would resonate more highly with that age group.

So I think of it as a deck of cards. You can't have a one size fits all narrative, but you use it in the appropriate channels, whether that be in-person with a millennial or boomer, or digitally, when you've got a crowd of a mix of people on Twitter, versus you go on TikTok, and it's interpretive dancing and it's a different style of that. I don't know how to do that, but I know other people do, and we have to propagate Bitcoin's narrative everywhere. So when people do this right, I would recommend, when you talk about Bitcoin, try out different narratives, see which one sticks, see which one resonates.

Don't just stick to one and keep going down that path. Mine has been refined through eight years of talking about Bitcoin. I have talked to thousands of people about Bitcoin, so I've seen what sticks generally. Now again, it's not one size fits all, but don't just choose your own narrative for Bitcoin. Try to see what resonates with your audience and through that, if you approach it with that mindset, you will help propagate Bitcoin much more effectively than just kind of bullheadedly saying how you feel about it.

If you talk about it like, "Oh, I like to buy guns illegally online with Bitcoin," great, sure, do whatever you'd like, but don't use that if you're talking to a law abiding citizen. They never question their government, they're going to find you insane and so, I'm not saying that's a bad narrative, I'm just saying it's the appropriate narrative for that audience.

Peter McCormack: I get it. I'll tell you what else, I'd like see it into the kind of Bitcoin on Bitcoin of crime that goes on. Bitcoiners are attacking other Bitcoiners for not being exactly the same Bitcoiner as them. That's just fucking useless and I think it's so unhelpful. I've got a group who troll me constantly and I'm like, "I'm on your team, dudes!

I'm just trying to bring in a bunch of people who aren't the same as you," and it's just like, "Troll, troll, troll, troll. You're a piece of shit, go fuck yourself, you're a scammer." It's just so relentless. It's like, "I'm definitely on the same team here. We should work together."

Dan Held: Totally! I get a lot of flack too. A lot of people are like, "Oh, Dan said not your keys, not your coins isn't always an appropriate narrative", and I'm like, "Yeah, it's not." Then people misconstrue it as like, "Oh, Dan doesn't believe in not your keys, not your coins, like self custody." I'm like, "No, I didn't say that. I just said it's not appropriate for a newbie right away." I actually block a decent amount of Bitcoiners. We're not all going to get along, but sorry.

Peter McCormack: Same with me.

Dan Held: Yeah, I think you trigger a few more than I do.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm still getting triggered and my job's to explore this shit. If I'm asking the question, somebody else probably wants the question answered, that's the reality. Look at my show downloads, people want the answers to these questions, so stop worrying about it. Don't be offended by someone asking the question or having an opinion. Fuck, man!

Dan Held: Yeah, when I put together my Tweetstorm, I think you had gotten flack, particularly this Tweetstorm. The reason we are talking today is, I put together a Tweetstorm on Bitcoin's marketing, and Peter had gotten some flack, and what you got that flack for, that was part of the reason I wrote this. This was all coming together in my head, and then that...

Peter McCormack: For making money!

Dan Held: That reinforced like, "Okay, Bitcoiners have a really messed up perspective of marketing, because they're going after Peter for making money" and so that's why a few of the bits, I kind of defended your podcast and I'm like, "Wait, so you think Peter's overpaid because he makes X amount of money, but it's a free market."

You can't simultaneously be an anti-free market individual and be a Bitcoiner. You have to be a free market advocate and for Bitcoiners to go after you for making money, I thought it was really silly, and they were like, "Oh, he's not marketing Bitcoin perfectly." I'm like, "I don't know, man. It's just his own narrative of Bitcoin."

Peter McCormack: "He's a scammer. Once the next bull run comes, he'll be a shitcoiner again. He's going to be Roger Ver to..." Fucking heard it over and over, dude. No, I appreciate you doing that. I understand that with Pomp, I defend the shit out of Pomp, I think he's a great guy and look, we don't agree on altcoins, we don't agree on everything, but we agree on Bitcoin a lot, and I support what he does and I appreciate him. I just think it's very easy to be this hardcore Bitcoiner, rigid and not moving.

"I CoinJoin, I Tor, I do all that shit," and I'm just like, "Yes, that's amazing you do that, but I'm focused on this other 99.9% of people, who don't understand the shit, who want some exposure", and they want to get in, and hopefully, they'll get there, but let's not expect them to make the leap from, "I've heard of Bitcoin" to tomorrow, "I'm downloading Tor and buying a Coldcard wallet." It's just fucking ridiculous. So yeah, I appreciate it dude.

Dan Held: Yeah I think it's crazy too, because we all have the same objective, get more people to learn, understand, HODL, and become believers in Bitcoin. I just don't think they're going to deal...

Peter McCormack: And get a Lambo!

Dan Held:Yeah and then hopefully a Lambo some day. But you're not going to go A to Z in an afternoon, and when you do that, it's a bit overwhelming and it's dangerous. Again, like the loaded gun analogy, you're handing them a loaded gun, and they shoot themselves in the foot, and you're like, "Oh, you should've known how to use a gun" and they're like, "No one ever taught me to use it."

Peter McCormack: That's a good idea.

Dan Held: But you give them one two minute lesson, and then you're like, "Okay, you're good to go. Here you go."

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it recruits more Bitcoiners.

Dan Held: Look, Bitcoin is an incredible, incredible innovation for humankind. It's something that I'm dedicating my life to, teaching more people about Bitcoin, and I just felt responsible to talk about, "Hey guys, let's zoom out, look about how we market Bitcoin. Marketers aren't sleazy salesmen. They're just trying to get the point across" and that's what we're all trying to do.

Peter McCormack: Dude, you're killing it! Listen, this is probably the longest we've gone without actually seeing each other in person, because of this fucking lockdown, It's been... So hopefully, it's going to end soon. I'll get over the pond and we'll hook up. I appreciate you man, I appreciate everything you do. We talk a lot, people want to know this, we talk a lot, we talk weekly about stuff and share ideas and it's really good to do and it's a very good friendship that I'm glad I have. So listen, appreciate and love everything you're doing, tell people where to find you and where to follow you.

Dan Held: Well, as a mentioned earlier, I try to propagate the narrative across many different channels, @DanHeld on Twitter, and Dan Held on LinkedIn, and danheld.com. So all pretty easy, pretty easy to find me. It's funny, because I have people coming up to me and telling me, "Hey Dan, I follow you on LinkedIn." I think it's kind of crazy. I don't know many people that hang out on LinkedIn, but that's why I started talking over there, is people were like, "Hey, I see your stuff on LinkedIn." So why not?

Peter McCormack: All right man, well keep crushing it and hopefully I'll see you soon!

Dan Held: All right Peter, thanks for having me! Always a blast, and hopefully we'll see each other soon in-person. Cheers!