WBD611 Audio Transcription

From Paralysis to Bitcoin with Kale Hyder

Release date: Friday 27th January

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Kale Hyder. 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.

Kale Hyder works in an investment bank. In this interview, we discuss how his life 7 years ago changed on a dime: a rare spinal inflammation led an aspiring high school basketball player to have to deal with becoming quadriplegic. We talk about the physical and mental rehabilitation, and how, with the help of others, he’s found direction, purpose and happiness.

“When we made that drive home, we got home, we got in the driveway. And when we were in the driveway I was crying because it was a realisation that, at that point, I didn’t accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in those six weeks where I thought I was just going to walk out.”

— Kale Hyder

Interview Transcription

Kale Hyder: I was trying to figure out the angle here.  You saw my thread and then you were like, "Cool", but I've been trying to figure out how this fits in with your podcast, especially some of the more recent episodes, you've been like, "I want to focus on macro a little bit more", and I'm like, "Okay, I'm not the best at the yen!"

Peter McCormack: Right.  Well, listen, I always have a page of notes.  Danny, when do I never need my notes?

Danny Knowles: Well, sometimes we'll print you out notes and if you like the interview, you'll read one question and then never look at them again.

Peter McCormack: But there's certain types of interview where I don't really need notes.  I make a Bitcoin show, but I'll go rogue sometimes.  There's shows where we don't talk about Bitcoin, I mean you'll know that.  The ones I enjoy the most are just personal stories, where someone's got a story to tell me about them and their life.  And sometimes, look, I have the luxury, I can bring on who the fuck I want, right?  I saw your thread and I was like, "Whoa!"  Then I saw you're a bitcoiner and I was like, "Well, you're a brother, you're in the same world as me", so I reached out, I was like, "Do you want to come on, tell me your story?" 

We might talk about Bitcoin, we might not talk about Bitcoin, but there's no angle, it's just this is interesting.  I wouldn't say I was like, "Cool!", I was like, "Fucking hell, that's a --"  I mean, people don't know what the hell we're talking about yet, but that's a lot, right; you've been through a lot.  Some people have had a really rough few years and I think by listening to your story, it's going to give perspective on people's lives, certainly for mine.  If I've ever moaning about any shit, I'll think about when I met Kale.  And I think most of all, I mean I don't know what Caroline will say about this, but I noticed your sense of humour through the thread and you're super-positive.  I was like, "I just want to meet this guy", see what you've got to say.

We should probably help people out here, they're probably like, "Who's this guy?  What the hell are they going to talk about?"  Do you just want to start from the morning you woke up when things had changed?  You just tell your story.

Kale Hyder: Sure.  So, the summer after my freshman year of high school, I was getting into a lot of lifting and a lot of basketball practice, shooting around on my own.  I was really into sports, athletics, and after my freshman year of not really excelling as much as I had wanted to on the basketball court, I focused on that summer as my chance of making the varsity team, the senior team of my high school.  I wanted to be the starting guard, or the forward on that basketball team.

Peter McCormack: So, you were 18?

Kale Hyder: I was 15.

Peter McCormack: Oh, 15?  Okay.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so I wanted to be playing with the 17- and 18-year-olds.  I didn't want to play with people my age group, it was kind of an ego thing.  I wanted to play against the best people in my district and my state.  So, my way of approaching that was, I'm going to put my all into getting stronger, because when you're that young, two or three years of strength is a world of difference, because you're going up against 6' 5" people, who are 220, and I'm 120, 130, 6' at the time, they would throw me around.  But you also had to be able to score and defend.  So, I really prioritised my sports that summer.

I didn't believe in rest, I didn't believe in recovery, I just wanted to go as hard as possible at every single opportunity I got at lifting, at basketball, whatever, and that eventually caught up to me.  So, about three weeks of just intensity, and I was also a cross-country runner as well, so I was adding four or five miles onto that every day.

One of the mornings I woke up, 16 June 2015, and I had tingling in my fingers, numbness in my hands, weakness in my shoulders, I couldn't put my arms above my head and I was, "Okay, that's strange, maybe I'll take today off", which I didn't do, because I didn't believe in that.  My perspective was, if I was not working, someone was out there working out-working me, which was not a healthy attitude, but I also didn't have really anyone to look up to at that time on my team to tell me, "That's not a healthy attitude, we need a rest and recover".

So, I moved through that day, I take the day off, I go to the paediatrician.  The paediatrician says, "This is strange, but you're not really showing any nerve pinching.  We'll get you an X-ray, we'll see if there's anything happening and we'll prescribe ibuprofen", essentially a pain medicine.  So, I go to the X-ray, nothing's on the X-ray. 

The next morning I wake up, same symptoms.  I can't put my arms above my head, there's pins and needles in my hands, and I'm frustrated because I was hoping sleep would just take away those symptoms.  I move throughout that morning, move throughout that afternoon, I'm laying on the couch watching TV, and then I start to feel internally anxiety as if something is really wrong.  So, I stand up, I'm walking through the house and I feel this really strong sense internally of just fear. 

I call my mum home because I'm starting to lose function in my arms and I really can't move them at all.  I call her home, she worked 15 minutes away.  She gets home.  By that time, I'm crying, I'm upset, I tell her, "We need to call the therapy office, try to get me in for physical therapy, maybe they can work something out with my arms", and she calls the therapy office.  When she tells me that they're not going to be able to see me until the next morning, I go really crazy, upset.  My mum tells me to sit down on the couch, she's going to massage my shoulders, she's going to put Biofreeze to try to cool me off and I'm still crying, still shaking.  Then, after 10 minutes of that she's like, "All right, let's try to stand up and walk this off".

When she told me to stand up, I could no longer stand.  So, I'm sitting on the couch, really not able to move my arms, cannot stand.  My mum starts crying of course because it's very upsetting for her not knowing what's happening.  She calls my dad home, my dad works 20 minutes away as well.  He gets home.  By the time he gets home, I'm still in a similar state, a little bit worse.  They carry me to the car, so I've got mum and dad on both sides, they carry me, they sit me in the front seat and we drive to the local hospital.

When we get to the local hospital, they're not really used to this type of severity.  I'm from a smallish town on the Iowa/Illinois on the Mississippi, they're not really used to these cases.  So, the team that comes out to get me is kind of lackadaisical.  They're like, "Maybe this kid broke a bone", and then my mum's like, "You need to come out now".  She storms past them, gets me a wheelchair, puts me in the wheelchair, the team's just standing back because my mum just takes over those situations.

Luckily, they got me a room, they put me in a bed and luckily there was a physician there who had been from a larger, regional hospital and he had seen these cases before, so he knew what needed to be done instantly.  Essentially what needed to be done was, I needed to be lying flat, I needed a catheter put into my bladder because eventually I would lose all ability to control my bladder and my bowels, because paralysis is more than just sensation and your physical strength, it also affects internal organs.  So, they put a catheter in my bladder.  And as a 15-year-old, being completely naked on a bed and having three or four people around you, putting IVs in your arms, catheter in your bladder, it was --

Peter McCormack: That sucks.

Kale Hyder: It was intense, I wasn't really sure what was happening.  And at that point, I didn't know what was going to be the severity of this.  Was I going to live; was I reaching a blow-off top here and I would just eventually settle into a neutral state?  I wasn't sure what the endgame was at that point, so it was more of anxiety of, "This is weird but where are we headed?"

Peter McCormack: But at that point, you're not diagnosed with anything?

Kale Hyder: No.  So, they're just trying to make sure all of my vitals are stable, they're trying to make sure that I'm able to urinate, essentially just make sure I'm in a stable place.

Peter McCormack: Okay, then what.

Kale Hyder: After a half hour, 45 minutes there of them helping me get stable, they're like, "Okay, we're at a local hospital.  You can be better treated at a larger, regional hospital that has more resources, teams that are trained to treat this condition".  They didn't know what the condition was, but they knew it was some type of neurological condition.  They're like, "We don't have the capacity here to treat that, so we're going to put you in an ambulance and then we're going to push you over to the regional hospital three hours away".

So, I get in the ambulance with my mum.  I'm on a stretcher at that point, just arms at my side.  At that point, I have no movement below my shoulders.  So, all I can do is sort of look over to my mum with my eyes, but I can't move my arms or my legs, I cannot feel the stretcher underneath my body; it feels like I'm floating in space.  It's almost as if you have this cable and it gets cut and anything above the cable, which would be my head and my neck, everything is fine.  Everything below is fair game for the most part, you don't have really anything.

I lie there for three hours and as soon as I get to the regional hospital they say, "We're going to do an MRI so we can have imaging of your brain and your spinal cord".  So they want to rule out maybe there was trauma; all the athletics I was doing, maybe there was some internal trauma or damage that's pressing on my brain or pressing on my spinal cord that they'll need to do surgery on.  They were trying to rule out, "Do we need to do surgical operations right now; or is this just an internal, maybe a stroke, maybe an autoimmune condition that we can treat with drugs, pharmaceuticals?"  They were trying to rule out surgery first.

So, I get in the MRI machine and it was a three- or four-hour MRI, because you have to get all of your brain imaged and then each segment of your spinal cord, there's four segments, so they do each scanning of the cord with and without contrast; and contrast is a way that they can see different agents within the body that may or may not help them make a diagnosis, right. 

So, I'm in there and -- growing up, my mum's Catholic, I was a Christmas Catholic, so I went to church on Christmas.  I did go to a Catholic school, K through 12, so I did have religion class and we did go to church sometimes with school.  But that was the first time where I was unsure if I was going to pull through, because no one had told me what was happening because no one knew what was happening.  So, I wasn't sure if at any point, my vitals could go crazy, I would no longer be able to breathe, because they were very concerned that if the paralysis kept moving upward, as the paralysis moves upward towards the brain, the closer it gets to the brain there's an area called the brainstem.  The brainstem is responsible for your breathing.

So, if the paralysis kept moving upward towards the brainstem and affected the brainstem, I would no longer to be able to breathe.  So, they wanted to make sure that was not happening and they were watching me really closely.  So, while I'm in the MRI machine, I had memorised the Rosary growing up, I knew all the prayers and I just kept saying the prayers, because I wasn't sure what was going to happen.  I was like, "If I die, at least I atoned for my sins", or whatever; I was really grasping for anything at that point.

So, I make it out of the MRI and it's like 2.00am or 3.00am at that point, and the doctor's like, "Just go to bed, we'll look at the scans while you're asleep and we will let you know what we think in the morning.  I was wearing contacts at the time, I had no way obviously of taking out my contacts, so my cousin and my mum were helping me take out my contacts, and it was this whole very, I guess just dramatic scene, because they're trying to care for me, I can't care for myself and as a young man, you want to be independent, you want to care for yourself and now you have your mum right there.  So, it's a really big change at that point.

Peter McCormack: Wow.  Had you been in an MRI machine before?

Kale Hyder: Not until then, no.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I've been in one.  Four hours feels a long time, because they're claustrophobic.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, the whatever, the tube is right in front of your face and it's drilling noises.

Peter McCormack: Did you sleep in it because I slept in mine?  I was in there for 15 minutes, I think I slept for 10!

Kale Hyder: I've slept in MRIs since then but that very first time, I was just too worked up at that point to have even been able to sleep.

Peter McCormack: I mean, your mum sounds like a badass at the moment.

Kale Hyder: She's a badass, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll come back to mum.  So, did you sleep okay that night?

Kale Hyder: I did.  I mean, it was only four hours-ish, because by the time the doctors came around for morning rounds, it was 6.00am.  So, they came in and they did their best to walk me through it and at that point, the only thing that I cared about was being able to play basketball again.  Basketball and athletics was my identity.  I was like, "I can handle anything you throw at me, just as long as I can play by September", because I didn't grasp the severity of the situation.  Obviously I was like, "Okay, I don't really know what's happening here, maybe this is the end, but there's probably treatment here.  Three or four months of some physical therapy and I'll be ready to go for the season".

Peter McCormack: It sounds like you were flipping between this is either super-bad, or we can fix this.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, this is super-bad but you can fix this.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.

Kale Hyder: So, they come in and they give an initial diagnosis of transverse myelitis.  So, transverse just means "across", and myelitis is "of inflammation".  So, essentially it was a diagnosis of the spinal cord, a cross-section of the spinal cord that had inflammation.  So, it was a really generic diagnosis that looking back and after being in it for several years and meeting other people, most doctors just label it; any inflammation of the spinal cord, transverse myelitis, because they don't really know what's happening, they don't know a cause.  They're just, "We see some inflammation there.  That inflammation is leading to scarring, or the scarring is already there".  That scarring, when you scar nerves, it essentially kills them. 

So, we have inflammation around the spinal cord, we have scarring of the spinal cord, we don't know why and I still asked, "Am I going to be able to play basketball?" and at that point the doctor was, "This is going to be a little more intense than just a broken bone.  This is going to be a longer process.  We don't have any drugs or pharmaceuticals to just wipe this out completely, you can't just get a Pfizer drug for five weeks and then you can walk out of the hospital.  Luckily you don't need surgery, so we don't need to operate on you".  There was no blunt force to my brain or my spinal cord, "But all we have is, we want to clear up that inflammation, so we'll do some anti-inflammatory steroids", because at that point, they didn't know.  

When you first have these injuries, they don't know if the lack of function below that injury line is due to the injury itself, or the second-hand response of inflammation to that area.

Peter McCormack: So, the area that inflammation was, was that quite high up then?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so it was a C5, so cervical 5, so that's the highest level of the spinal cord.  You have the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, sacral.  So, that's right about the base of my neck, which lined up to where my function was.  Right about my pecs is where the line between no function and complete function was.

Peter McCormack: Right, and that's why couldn't originally get your arms up and it's gradually gone down the body?

Kale Hyder: Right, exactly.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Is that the final diagnosis, or was that the diagnosis at the time?

Kale Hyder: No. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Kale Hyder: Well, it's the final diagnosis for some physicians we have seen.  So, some will say, "Yeah, this looks like an auto-immune condition that caused scarring and inflammation".  Others were like, "This was a vascular event.  Essentially, you've had a spinal stroke".  So, most people think of strokes in the brain, right.  You have an area of the brain that is no longer receiving blood flow and the tissue dies.  What some of my neurologists think is that there was an area of the spinal cord that was not receiving blood flow, and then the nerves there died.

But it's not just you have this area of the spinal cord and just that cervical area that controls your shoulders or your arm is affected; anything below that is also affected.  So, it was a really high injury on the spinal cord and I don't know what happened, I still don't know what happened, but I do lean more toward it being a spinal stroke in my opinion, because I do have a blood disorder which causes oxygen to not sufficiently be moved through the blood.

Peter McCormack: That's a blood disorder you had previous to this?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, it's genetic, so my dad has it, his dad has it, and that would make sense.  If oxygen's not flowing properly through the blood and you're doing all of this intense work, that could lead to areas of the body not receiving enough oxygen, and in this case it was the spinal cord.  That's just my hypothesis.  I'm not a medical expert, but after just looking at it and trying to piece it together, that's what I've come to think and I guess that's just what gives me, the right word isn't "comfort", but satisfaction that that's what I think happened.

Peter McCormack: And I'm guessing you've done a lot of googling and research.

Kale Hyder: I did a whole neuroscience degree.

Peter McCormack: Because of this?

Kale Hyder: Because of this.

Peter McCormack: Oh, we will come to that.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, we'll get to that.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Isn't it strange though, you would expect the doctors to just know, you kind of expect them to know.  And tell them if this is your experience.  I'll do the experience of my mother when she got diagnosed with cancer.  You get a diagnosis but it doesn't matter how many people you see, there's not always a consistent recommendation of what you can do.  So, my mum basically did her own research in trying to treat it, she had the treatment from the doctors, she had different consultants give her different ideas of what she could do, and then she did what she did herself. 

I don't know if you had a similar experience, but my expectation prior to this, not having had anything serious myself, is that you just go, diagnoses are consistent and the consultants give you a consistent plan of action, but that's not what the case was with my mother, which surprised me.  I don't know if yours was similar to that.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, it was similar where we would go to one doctor, who was supposedly the renowned figure in the space, we would go to another one who was a renowned figure in the space, they would have competing diagnoses and because they were competing, they had different treatment protocols for the most part.  One recommended this drug, another recommended this, one said this was important to do, the other said that's not important to do.

What I credit my parents for in this process is that they were able to take multiple opinions and synthesize what they thought was the best course of action for me.  I tried to do my best in that scenario, but I was 15.  So, I was trying to understand everything and do my best, but really it was a large responsibility of my parents to try to make the right calls, and I think they made the right calls looking back.  I don't think they passed up anything that I would have done, or made me do anything that I wouldn't have done, so I really give them credit because there were a lot of competing ideas and a lot of competing, "Take this intense drug that we may or may not know the side effects of.  Go and do that".  They had to decide, are the benefits of that drug worth the potential consequences of that drug.

Peter McCormack: How long were you in that hospital for?

Kale Hyder: That hospital was for ten days, because I had to do the anti-inflammatory course of drugs and I also did this treatment called plasmapheresis, which is essentially a blood filtering process, where they take your blood out of your body over the course of several days, they filter what they believe are harmful agents out of the blood, and then kind of push your blood back into your body.  So, it was like a filtering mechanism, paired with those anti-inflammatory agents, to bring down the inflammation around that lesion, or that injury in the spinal cord.  Those two combined lasted ten days.

Peter McCormack: And during that period, what kind of functions were you getting back?

Kale Hyder: So, during that time, not a lot of function.  My days consisted mostly of just lying in the bed and I was watching -- there was a TV up in the corner and I just loved watching the nature channel, I'm not sure why, but something about just like deer running through the prairie, I was like, "This is great"!  So, I watched the nature channel a lot while they were doing those infusions, because those lasted.  They would come in in the morning at like 9.00am or 10.00am and you wouldn't be done until the evening.

Peter McCormack: Pretty shit.

Kale Hyder: You had to be there hooked up.

Peter McCormack: Is it almost like dialysis?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, because that plasmapheresis I would relate to dialysis.  So, the two-pronged approach to these conditions, these neurological conditions where they have no cure and they have really no pharmaceuticals or drugs to give you to really do anything, it's not like they could just give me a drug to regrow that area of the spinal cord; that doesn't exist.  So, the two-pronged approach is, one, let's try to clean it up as much as possible, get that inflammation down, let's filter out harmful agents in the blood.  Once we've done that, therapy. 

It's on you to do physical therapy with therapists and try to regain strength over time, and there's no guarantee that you'll get any strength back, depending on the severity of the injury.  But if you do the therapy and there is potential to get strength back and you do the therapy well, then you could regain strength.  So in my head, I'm like, "Okay, challenge accepted".

Peter McCormack: "Let's go, motherfucker".

Kale Hyder: Yeah, let's go.  I'm going to go to therapy, I'm going to treat it essentially like I was treating my basketball and my lifting.  So, after those ten days, I moved to a children's therapy centre in Chicago.

Peter McCormack: How far away is that from your home though?

Kale Hyder: Two-and-a-half hours.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so was mum staying with you?

Kale Hyder: Mum stayed with me, yeah.  So, she stayed up there.  So, I was an inpatient there for six weeks, so she stayed with me those six weeks, my brother and dad would come and stay on the weekends, then on the weekends my dad would stay in my room with me and then my mum would stay with my brother at the hotel.  Because one aspect that I don't think about enough is that my brother, he's younger, so he's two years younger than me, he would have been 12 or 13 at that time.  He was left without his mum, and my dad was working to provide.  So, my dad was at work essentially the whole time.  He was left essentially on an island by himself for months, right.  

My grandparents pitched in as best they could, his school Principal would drive him home from school, so he was without parental -- I wouldn't say without parental guidance, but not the same as the nuclear family being at home every night, cooking him dinner.  He didn't have his mum for like two or three months.

Peter McCormack: What kind of kid is he?  Is he a good kid, naughty kid?

Kale Hyder: No, he's a good kid.

Peter McCormack: All right, okay.

Kale Hyder: But still, if you don't have your mum at that young of an age, he missed her, he missed me, he was worried about me.  So, that was really tough on him.

Peter McCormack: How was he around you at first?  Was he cool with it or was he freaked out?

Kale Hyder: I think he was freaked out, because it's very shocking when…  I mean, he still looked up to me, but he looked up to me from a strong, athletic, male standpoint, I guess, at that point.  I don't know.

Peter McCormack: You're the big brother, right?

Kale Hyder: I'm the big brother.  Then he comes in and he sees me in a hospital bed with no movement, so I'm sure it was an adjustment for him.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean the only thing I have to empathise with that scenario, when I was 18, my sister was knocked down by a police car, and the only reason she survived -- the police car was at like 50 miles an hour -- is, when she got tossed in the air, she landed on her mouth; her teeth saved her, they shattered but they saved her.  And she was my older sister and I was taken to the hospital to see her and she was actually in a coma and just strapped up to these machines.  I think she died twice during the night, and it's just so overwhelming, everything's overwhelming, you have no idea what's going on.  But I was 18.  I mean, what did you say, he was 13?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's a lot to deal with.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so I'm sure he was shocked, but eventually he was cool with it.  But obviously, any situation that severe is going to be shocking when you go in and you see someone, especially when hours earlier they were just fine, and then you go in and within a matter of hours, it's a completely different setup.

Peter McCormack: But even though this is obviously a really testing time, did it start to get to the point where you could laugh and joke; was that at all happening?

Kale Hyder: I think so, yeah.  I mean, we would make the best out of those situations.  I remember there was a video of me, still at the hospital before going to that rehab centre, of me trying to pick up this cookie and eat it, something so trivial to most people.  You have a cookie on the table; put it in your mouth.  And it was this three-minute process of me trying to grab this cookie off the table, and I had no arm strength, so I finally get it and then my hands flop on my face and I'm just eating like that!

So, there were those moments where it's not like this serious thing the whole time.  It's still your life, you're still trying to navigate it and what are the next steps, and there's so many people coming in and out.  So, it's kind of exciting, so you're like, "Oh, there's a new person there, they want to come and talk to me now".  I'm like, "Oh, we're going to Chicago".  So, it's an emotional rollercoaster of like, "Okay, this really weird thing happened to me, but I'm going to Chicago for six weeks to this therapy centre, this is interesting, and now all these people are tweeting at me because, I don't know, they want to give their support, or something".

It's all of these really weird emotions bundled up and you're getting your blood out of you and put back into you, so it's just very strange.

Peter McCormack: And so, when you moved to that Chicago hospital, you said that in those first ten days, you hadn't really gained any functions back, so were you essentially quadriplegic?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  So, I still am technically.

Peter McCormack: Technically.

Kale Hyder: So, the diagnosis for a quadriplegic is just any paralysis in all four limbs.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Kale Hyder: So, where a paraplegic is paralysis in two limbs, and most of the time that means you have paralysis in your legs because, like we said, it's hard to have paralysis in your arms and not in your legs, just because of the way that the communication flows from the brain.  If you have a spot up here, it's usually going to affect places below it, because it's that whole train track analogy.  So, anything below that spot is going to be affected, for the most part.  So, I'm still a quadriplegic, but people may or may not label me as that because I can walk around for the most part.  And for the most part, people are like, "Okay, he has a limp, he has weak hands, his hands don't look the same, they don't work the same, but he can walk around so he's not a quadriplegic".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so my assumption is, if you're a quadriplegic, you're in a wheelchair, you have no function below, so I've learned something today.

Kale Hyder: It depends what your definition is, but the medical definition is that.  If I go see my doctor, I'm a quadriplegic to him.

Peter McCormack: I'm trying to remember back to the thread, because last time I looked was shortly after I showed it to Danny; I'd read it twice.  I feel like I saw you in a chair, but I feel like, were you strapped into it?

Kale Hyder: I don't think I was strapped in, but it was a heavy-duty chair.  My arms were up here and that was really one of the first chairs that I had.  Yeah, that one up there.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so we'll put this up for the people on YouTube.  And then, what's the other one, was that prior?

Kale Hyder: Oh, this one?  This was from a few months ago!  That's my cat.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  That's not the original thread though, right?

Kale Hyder: No, this is.

Peter McCormack: Is that the original thread?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I remember now.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so that was me trying to put my arms above my head.  I'm glad I documented that, I thought it was so funny.

Peter McCormack: So, was that before everything happened?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, that was the night before my parents had to carry me out to the car and go to the hospital.  It was that first day where I experienced symptoms, and you can see I can barely put my arms above my head.

Peter McCormack: You look like a young college bro!

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I know!

Peter McCormack: Okay, so the six weeks, where did you get from at the start to the end of the six weeks?

Kale Hyder: I gained a lot in those six weeks.  So, when I first got to the children's hospital, I was having a lot of neck pain from lying in bed for several days, at that point.  When you lie in bed for that long, you lose all your muscle mass, it literally just melts away.  So, everything I had worked to build at that point, which wasn't a lot, I was 14 or 15, but all of that muscle mass just pretty much melted away, and I could barely lift my head up off the bed.

So, when I first got to that children's centre, I remember them coming in the first day and were like, "All right, we're going to put on socks", and I was like, "I can barely lift my head off this bed without screaming in pain".  So, I remember that first session, I was crying because it hurt so badly and my mum was like, "Okay, we need to get him medication to take away this pain so that he can actually participate in therapy.  So, they put me on an oral steroid, and that immediately eliminated the pain, which was beautiful and I've reflected on this a lot and I've given the advice to people who have just gone through these types of events that you want to get to as little to no pain as possible, because then you can actually focus on recovery.  It's really hard to focus on what my next step should be, or going to therapy, when you're just in severe pain the entire time.

Obviously, some people do have to do both, there's no remedy for their pain immediately, and maybe they'll have pain their entire lives and they have to manage that pain while they do therapy.  But if you have the ability to eliminate that pain, or at least tone it down so that you can do your therapy, I think that's a good course, because as soon as that happened to me then I was like, "Okay, sure, I'll try to put on these socks".  I have no function in my hands, I cannot sit up, I have no core strength, "I'll try to put on these socks with you for an hour straight".  It took me an hour and I probably didn't even put it on!

So, those six weeks, I really enjoyed it because of the intensity of it.  You had two hours of physical therapy each day and then two hours of occupational therapy.

Peter McCormack: Did you like the intensity because it was almost like training, like back to basketball?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But had you also convinced yourself -- at this point, are you thinking you're going to get back to full function?

Kale Hyder: Oh, yeah, I'm like, "I'm going to walk out of here in six weeks".

Peter McCormack: But do you believe you would be getting back to the point like the video?

Kale Hyder: Eventually.  I was like, okay, maybe I've got to miss a season.

Peter McCormack: All right, cool.

Kale Hyder: But junior year.  I'll miss this season, but junior year I'll be able to do it, I'll be able to play at that level that I want to play at.

Peter McCormack: Caroline, is he competitive with everything?

Caroline: Yes!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I thought so.  Okay, I like that.

Kale Hyder: So, the physical therapy is what you would think of.  It's like, eventually let's try to stand, let's try to do some core exercises, let's try to sit on this ball without falling off.  Then the occupational therapy is really for hands.  Most people think of occupational therapy as, "I got hurt on the construction job and now I'm going to work on that specific aspect so that I can go back to my job", because I think in America, occupational therapy is synonymous to like, you're doing therapy so you can get back to your job, if you have like a labour job.

But in this case, in my treatment plan, it was focused extensively on anything below my shoulders, so my hands specifically like, can you brush your teeth; can you use the bathroom; can you put your clothes on; can you make your bed?  All of these little tasks that everyone just does, it was -- most people say, "I had to relearn how to do that".  It's not relearning in the sense that I forgot how to brush my teeth, it was, "Okay, I have a toothpaste right in front of me, I have a toothbrush right in front of me, how am I going to unscrew the toothpaste when I have no grip in either hands, and all I can do is maybe pick up the toothpaste like this?  How am I going to brush my teeth when I cannot pick up a toothpaste, unscrew it, squeeze it onto my toothbrush, pick the toothbrush up and then brush my teeth?  How am I going to do that when all I can do is put my hands in my face?"

Peter McCormack: It feels like there's two things there.  There's learning to function with what you have, but also learning to regain function.

Kale Hyder: Right, because when you're first in that place, you'll do everything you can to brush your teeth.  And then the therapist's job is, "Okay, you can do it and that's passable, but we're going to try to improve on that over time so that you can more easily do it, because sure you can do it in the way that you just described, but we're going to try to get it to where you can unscrew the toothpaste, where you can take your hand and then squeeze the toothpaste onto the toothbrush", trying to get it more to that prior space before my injury, where it was second nature.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure how you would explain this, but when I see this pen on this table and I want to pick it up, I don't know how it happens, it just happens, right.  When you're in that position, you also want to pick it up, what's actually happening?  Are you trying and just the hands slowly -- like, try and explain what relearning function is like?

Kale Hyder: So, could I borrow your pen?

Peter McCormack: You can borrow my pen.

Kale Hyder: Okay.

Peter McCormack: You can't see my notes though!

Kale Hyder: So, this pen right now, my left hand has -- I'll move these; I don't know if that's better.  I have this pen here.  Right now, I've done rehabilitation over seven-and-a-half years where I can pick up this pen.  Before my injury, I was right-handed.  My right hand right now, I can extend the fingers a little bit, but I cannot close them very well.  So, you see here how I have pinch?  I can pinch, pick this up.  This has no pinch, so how am I going to pick that up?

So, what I would do is I would look at what I needed to do, I would say, "These are the tools I have.  What am I going to do to pick up this pen?"  It's a lot of trial and error, it's a lot of iteration.  You're looking at it and you're like, "Okay, that doesn't work, that doesn't work", and over time, you get more function and you figure out what to do.  A cool story, a cool tangent is, I was right-handed before, I'm left-handed now, so I learned how to do everything with my left hand!

Peter McCormack: So, you write left-handed?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, now I do.

Peter McCormack: Is it neat?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  I did a post one time where I showed before my injury what my handwriting was, and then I wrote the same words with my left hand after my injury, and it's identical.  So, it was really cool that I was able to learn how to do that.  But to answer your question, it's a lot of trial and error and it's trying not to be frustrated, but it can be frustrating when your goal is to be completely independent again.  Before, I didn't want someone to always write for me, I wanted to do my best so that I could pick up the pen and I could write for myself, or no one was brushing my teeth for me, I was doing my best to try to brush my teeth.

There are some things that I still benefit the help with.  Very physical tasks, like if the trash needs to be taken out and it's all the way down the apartment complex, sometimes I'll have Caroline just help me run that down, because that requires a lot of effort.  But my goal over time is to try to do the best I can so that I can do more of those things for myself.

Peter McCormack: So, there's no scenarios where you just can't be arsed and you say, "Caroline, I can't do this"?

Kale Hyder: She's really good at picking up stuff like that, but sometimes she's like, "Seriously, you can do it"!

Peter McCormack: So, what is going on here?  Is it a case of the scar tissue in the spinal column is stopping a message get somewhere?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But when you are relearning, is it there is some repair happening in the spinal column?  How's that new muscle memory coming back?

Kale Hyder: So, what is really cool about the nervous system is, it can't grow back.  So, when nerves die, they're done.  But what they can do is they can reroute around areas.  So, what you're doing by this "relearning" is some nerves which once did one function will decide, I'm not telling them to do it, they will decide over time that I'm best utilised doing this other task that is no longer receiving function.

Peter McCormack: That's insane.

Kale Hyder: It is, yeah, the nervous system is really cool.  It's not like this wire system where this wire will always go here and always do this thing, it's very what we call "plastic", where it will, "Okay, I think I can better be used over here.  I'm going to reroute maybe 20% of what once went over here, over here, and then we're going to try to give this person grip again".

Peter McCormack: Right, so when you're going through the rehabilitation trying to relearn things, is that a response from the body saying, "Okay, I think I know what you're trying to do here", and it's relearning and it's rerouting based on that?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, and so for context, really after these injuries you have a year, maybe two years, to see growth and recovery, insane growth and recovery.  After that, it's not set in stone, but it's much harder to have that explosive recovery.  So, the physicians will tell you, "This is your time, you want to do as much as you can in therapy, treat it very seriously, because you have a lot of rerouting potential". 

Especially as a young person where your nervous system is still developing, it's much more responsive to that rerouting.  Whereas, if you put a 95-year-old grandma, it's not as responsive, the nervous system is not as flexible or responsive to those changes.  So, if a grandmother had my same injury, I would probably see more recovery and adaptability by my body, because the connections are not as in a solid or finished state.  Most people know the brain stops developing in your 20s.  But up until that 20s point, you have a lot of growth, you have a lot of development, both mentally, but definitely physically as well.

Peter McCormack: I find the nervous system quite spooky as well, it's kind of weird, in that I don't know if you know, I had back surgery a couple of years ago, nothing obviously like what you've been through.  I had a herniated disc and I had sciatica.  And what was weird, the sciatic pain in the back of the leg, what my consultant was saying, you've got no pain in your leg, it's the nervous system being tricked by the herniated disc pressing on it.  That bit is the part that sends the message to the brain if there is pain on there, and it's just interfering with that.  It's so fucking weird!

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It makes you realise, all pain is really just a part of the body doing a job to tell you something.  There's no such thing as actual pain, it's just a message, which I always found weird.  Did you have any of that ghost stuff going on?

Kale Hyder: The only real pain I had was that initial neck pain thankfully because I think it would have been really difficult, and a lot of the kids I was with at that hospital did have a lot of pain, so they would have to spend a lot of their time with therapists trying to work through that pain.  So, I'm glad that I didn't, because it was very tough in that first couple of weeks dealing with that pain.  But what some quadriplegics do have at the beginning is that they'll have that pain, but they'll also have intense nerve pain as well, or that tingling that I was experiencing in the very beginning, they'll just feel that very intensely throughout the body.

That tingling, you can think of it as when you sleep on your arm and you wake up in the morning and you're like, "I cannot --" it's full of static and you're shaking your arm, but it never goes away.  So, that's what that tingling is like and it can be very painful over time.

Peter McCormack: You talked about at the very start that you were doing a lot of weight training and things.  Did you attribute any of that to a potential cause of the injury?

Kale Hyder: My physicians were concerned about that.  They were like, "Did you do any different movements, any different lifts in those few days prior?  Maybe you tried a new machine or a new movement and it caused maybe those vertebrae to pinch on your spinal cord, or maybe push through it and cause trauma?"  But it was eventually ruled out, because the imaging doesn't look like blunt force trauma, it just looks like a vascular event of just dead tissue, but not bones or anything pushing through the spinal cord.

Peter McCormack: How common is this?

Kale Hyder: Not common.

Peter McCormack: Not common, which is why there aren't specific drugs or research into it?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, it's not common at all, I mean this specific type of quadriplegia.  There are car accidents, there are football injuries that all sort of have the same end result.  But the way of, okay, you wake up and you have this tingling and this weakness is not a very common -- I can't give you like 1 in 10 million, right, but it's not very common.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so you've done the six weeks in Chicago.  Is that the point you're sent home?

Kale Hyder: That's the point I'm sent home and that's the part where I feel I get to -- there are several lows in this process.  That was the first low that I experienced, because the first six weeks, seven weeks of doing all this therapy and the drugs and infusions; exciting.  You're surrounded with all these people, you're doing intense therapy, you're in Chicago --

Peter McCormack: You're improving.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, you're improving, and they want you to go out on the weekends to try to, "How are you going to navigate a mall after this, Kale?  How are you going to go to a restaurant after this, Kale?"  So, they're really trying to push you to not just sit at home and do nothing, which is unfortunately what I decided to do.  But when I first came home, when we made that drive home, we got home, we got on the driveway and when we were in the driveway, I was crying because it was a realisation that at that point, I didn't accomplish what I wanted to accomplish in those six weeks, where I just thought I was going to walk out.

A quick story.  In that therapy centre, there's this grand staircase that leads to the exit, which I think is really funny because you have a bunch of kids in wheelchairs and there's this grand staircase!  And the lunch room was right on the bottom of that staircase.  You'd have all these kids looking at this 25-stair staircase!

Peter McCormack: Was that meant to be your inspiration?

Kale Hyder: I have no idea, I just feel like it pissed everyone off.  But my mum was like, "Are you serious?"

Peter McCormack: Were you walking at all at that point?

Kale Hyder: Not at that point, no.

Peter McCormack: Were they not trying to get you to walk?

Kale Hyder: They were trying to.

Peter McCormack: Was that on those bars?

Kale Hyder: That took six months.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Kale Hyder: So, by the time I left, those six, seven weeks, I could maybe stand with three or four people making sure I didn't just fall over.  But going back to when I got home, it was the first time I took into account the mental aspect of, "Well, okay, this is life and what am I going to do about this?" and I didn't have a plan for how I was going to re-enter my life.  Because, those six, seven weeks, they don't feel like your actual life.  You feel like you're in a therapy centre working out the entire day.

Peter McCormack: This was over the summer period?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so I got home in late August, which is when I should have been starting school, but I didn't start school.  I didn't go back until October that year and I was doing remote work, where my teachers would send me assignments and I wouldn't write at that point, I wasn't writing; someone would have to write for me, which made the whole process…  Can you imagine, I was doing geometry and I was like, "Mum, can you write this equation?"  It was really painful and frustrating like, "Can you draw this triangle?  No, you drew it wrong, erase that".

Peter McCormack: Man, listen, during COVID I had to do the homeschooling for my daughter, and there were a few moments!

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I know.

Peter McCormack: But you still got back to school within two months.  So, when you go home, what is the plan on the medical front?  Do you come in once a week?

Kale Hyder: So, it's a very slow transition.  So, the reason they want you to go home is so you can get reintegrated with your community and figure out how you're going to live, how you're going to continue living your life.  So, those six weeks inpatient are done.  Then they want you to come back three times a week for outpatient therapy.  So, I would go up Monday, Tuesday-ish and be there for three or four days at the same place, but I would stay in a different part of the hospital, where no nurses, no care team were treating me, it was just my mum and I.

At that point, she was doing literally everything for me.  She was helping me shower, she's helping me use the bathroom, she was helping me put on my clothes, brush my teeth, all of these things.

Peter McCormack: Which you hated, and she didn't give a shit because she's your mum.

Kale Hyder: Right.  Well, you adapt to it a little bit.  If you've done that for several months at that point, you're like, "Okay, mum, it's time to shower", it's no longer weird.  But obviously I wanted to shower on my own.  So, when we went back to outpatient therapy, it was still doing the same workouts and stuff like that, where eventually that's where I was able to stand up, I was able to walk in those bars, I had a series of braces on my legs that I worked through, one that was a full leg brace; and once I graduated from that, I had a shorter brace below my knee; once I graduated from that, I had a different brace. 

So, it was this progression of braces, also a progress of walkers, so assistive devices, where at first it was a very big walker that I could put all of my forearm strength into, so that I wasn't really putting weight through my legs, and then once I was comfortable with that, it was, let's do a less-assistive walker so you're forced to put more weight through your legs.  So, over that six months, I think I was able to walk just a little bit.  I was still using my wheelchair to get around, but even then, I had no arm strength so I couldn't push my wheelchair at all.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so when you're back at school though in October, have you got somebody pushing you around at school?

Kale Hyder: No.  Well, yes, but I didn't really go to school.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so you were doing it at home?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When did you go back to school?

Kale Hyder: It would have been the next academic year.

Peter McCormack: Oh, so when you went back to school, you mean you were doing the homeschooling?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  I went actually to school that sophomore year like two times that year.  I went into the school twice, but I was doing all of my work virtually.

Peter McCormack: And those two times, was it to see friends, or actually go to class?

Kale Hyder: It was to try to go to class, but then I was not ready for that yet.

Peter McCormack: How was everyone else around you at school?

Kale Hyder: They were obviously supportive, but it felt like a pity case.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it.

Kale Hyder: Whereas, before, I was an athlete, I had an ego to myself, I felt I was smooth with women, all of these things.  And then when I went there it was just, "Oh, hi, buddy.  Oh, hi" and I hated that.  And I had a really good group of friends that came up every single weekend that summer and they did a really great job of making sure that I wasn't isolated that summer in Chicago by myself.  And then, when I was trying to reintegrate into my school and community, they were really leading that effort in a non-pity way and I really appreciated that.  They treated me like I was still Kale, because I was still Kale, I was just working through a condition.  But everyone else was like, "Oh, Kale".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you wanted them to give you shit.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I just wanted people to, like if I was being a dick, tell me I'm a dick; if I'm being an asshole, I'm an asshole.  But the looks; it was either the sympathy or pity looks, or it was the complete avoidance of me, and it was just like, "Guys, you used to do XYZ with me, you used to call me over for lunch, you used to want to sit by me in class and now I'm just this --" it just was gross. 

But I feel like that's a natural human response, when you see someone disabled, or you see someone in a wheelchair, you're like, "Oh…"  But really, that person's just going through a condition that's external.  It's the physical manifestation of what every other person is going through internally.  So, it really bothers me if, let's say someone lost their brother, they're working through that mentally internally.  I was working through it physically, externally, but I'm getting all of the pity.  I just wanted to be treated like I had been treated before.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean I guess it's hard because people sometimes don't know what to do.  But at the same time, that's why you need your close buddies around you.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, you need the close buddies to protect you and to be the intermediary force between people who are not sure what to do.  It is tough, and I mean we were all kids in that high school.  It's not like we were 20s, 30s; it's kids and kids don't always respond the best way.  But even now, if this was to happen and I went to work, I'm sure there would still be co-workers who would do the same thing.

I think my main goal of what I'm trying to do is really break down that first gut feeling of pity when you see someone who's disabled.  It's really just to be like, "Okay, that's a person who's working through something just like we all are; they're still just a person, so I'm going to treat them with decency, I'm not going to look at them in a way of pity, and I'm not going to just avoid looking at them because they're in a chair or they walk different".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's also the flipside to the pity.  It's also, and I don't mean this in a condescending way, but they also then can be inspiration for others.  That is something that you will have that you may not want to have, or may not accept, but it will exist.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I think about that a lot, because people will say that.  They'll say I'm inspiring, or they'll see -- an example of that that I see a lot is on social media.  There'll be a figure skater or a snowboarder who's amputated and they're a professional athlete or something, but everyone's like, "That's so inspirational.  If that person can do it, then I can do it".  So it feels like when people say that, it almost is like they're using that person as an object of, "That person has it so, so bad.  If they're able to get up and do it, then so can I", and it feels, I don't know, maybe it is condescending.  It's just that person is working through something, they don't really want to be treated like that, they want to be a bro, they want to be in; they don't want to be "othered" in that way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm going to push back on you a little bit here, because you did put your Twitter thread out there, you've told your story, and there may be a scenario where someone goes through something similar to you and they might find that.  So, whilst you may think it's kind of condescending, there may be another 15-year-old kid who sees this and is like, "Okay, he started here and he got here".

Kale Hyder: That's who I want to speak to, right.  I think it's just people who use it as a way to get out of bed, like just a regular person who is like, "Okay, now I'm going to go do the dishes because of that".  I want my story to help those who are in similar circumstances obviously, but also to be educational to the point where people realise I'm working through something hard, sure, but it's just my story and I want to help people, but I want to educate external observers as well.

Peter McCormack: But look, you might inspire somebody with a shitty example and not even know about it, and I personally don't think that's an issue.  I can see where it's coming from for you, because I'm starting to learn part of that journey, it almost feels like in the camp of that pity area.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, but that's what I'm trying to avoid, the feeling of inspiration out of pity.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I don't think it is inspiration out of pity.  I mean, sure, that might happen, but it's like that, "No good deed goes unpunished".

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, any goodness that comes out of it, just take it, I would say, but who am I to tell you?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  If people are interested in it, it's called inspiration porn.  So, it's essentially using others as you would use, in the sexual porn standpoint it's, "I'm going to use these two bodies in front of me to receive gratification".  In this standpoint it's, "I'm going to use an image of this 16-year-old amputee [or] this 16-year-old quadriplegic as a way to be motivated to go on with my day".  Essentially, it's a theory.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I guess you know it more because you're living it.

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  So, you said when you got back, you were going through a depressive episode.  What was going on there?

Kale Hyder: So, it was really just, when I got back, I was not sure what I was going to do, how I was going to handle myself, how I was going to reintegrate myself, because I wasn't going to school and sure, some people were coming over, that core friend group was coming over sometimes, but really I was just sitting in my room just by myself.  And if you just sit in your room by yourself for long enough, you begin to spiral.

I think what I needed more of is, I needed people to tell me, "Kale, go live your life.  We're going to figure out a way that if you want to go to the taco restaurant down the road, we're going to get you to the taco restaurant".  My fear was I would be a burden on others if I wanted to go to the taco restaurant, right, because at that time I had a wheelchair, so we would need to find a way to put the wheelchair into the car, make sure I was in the car comfortably; when we got to the space, we needed to make sure I got out of the car into the wheelchair; then, what if the taco restaurant only had stairs and there was no ramp into the taco restaurant, are you going to carry me up the stairs and then carry my wheelchair up the stairs?

What if the door frame is not wide enough for my wheelchair, because I had a large wheelchair because I'm 6' 3"; what if I could not physically get my wheelchair in?  And then, what if I got into the restaurant and then all the tables were too close to each other, so I had to interrupt all the parties to move them so that I could get to a table?  And then, what if I need to use the restroom, and I had at the time an elaborate way of using the restroom, and I can't get into the restroom and the stall that I need to get into is too small for my wheelchair, so I can't even use the restroom at the restaurant?  All of these things cycling through my head, I'm just going to stay home.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get that, okay.  So, really a big next part is to be able to get beyond the wheelchair; do you ever still use one?

Kale Hyder: I use a scooter.  I would say the next part is capitalising on the opportunity that I didn't really know of how much function could I regain, and nobody knows.  It's not like your doctor says, "This is your endpoint.  You'll be able to walk with a limp and your hands will somewhat work"; no one knows.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so it might have been that you cannot get back to a place of walking?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  It could have easily been that was it.

Peter McCormack: But you have that limited window?

Kale Hyder: You have a window, but the window is from academic journals.  Who really knows what's happening?  I would say, my goal was to get to walking.  But I think really what it is is trying to capitalise on the opportunity to regain function physically.  Mentally, what I completely ignored for several years, is the reintegrating and living life.  So, even though I would always find an excuse, even when I could use a wheelchair and then I could walk, sort of, with a limp or with a cane or with a walker, mentally I would still find an excuse not to do it.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Kale Hyder: I would be like, "Maybe it's too far from where the car is parked.  Maybe the bathroom won't work for me.  Maybe people are going to want to do other activities after and I'm not going to be strong enough to do it".  So, it's the mental component that I think I didn't take into account, but is really the most important part, is having the right attitude, more of a can-do attitude like, "I can go and do these things, I don't have to stay at home, and we will figure it out.  I will surround myself with people who will take care of me and look after me".  I didn't have that for really years, I was really on my own from a friend group standpoint.

When you're on your own from a friend group standpoint, having all of these supposed challenges, which are real but really are more fear, when you have someone who can help you through that, which I have now, then you can do all of these things and gain confidence.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  What was the moment where -- because, you had the determination early on, "Okay, I'm going to get back, I'm going to be playing basketball.  All right, it might take a little bit longer".  What was the bit where you realised, "Okay, this is something I'm living with now"?

Kale Hyder: It probably took a year.

Peter McCormack: Is that a year of acceptance?

Kale Hyder: Not acceptance, just it is what it is and I'm not happy with this.  And a lot of that mental drag and depressive episodes is really, I felt out of control.  It was really like, "Are you serious?"  I worked this hard and it didn't really give me the results or the outcome that I wanted, so it was really frustrating, I guess.  And that's why those depressive episodes came about, because I was like, "I worked this hard in this window of time that you told me and I'm not where I want to be.  What did I do wrong?  Did I miss an infusion?  Did I not take a certain drug?  Should I have done more?"

That's where those episodes come in, and you're focused on that and you're not focused on living your life, going to school, doing all of these things to actually be a person; you're just focused so much on the medical side, when you should just be focused on, "Yeah, you can do your therapy, but let's go out, let's go and do podcasts like these, right, let's feel good".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think, again I'll push back a little bit, I mean this is a lot to go through and you're a kid and there's a lot to think about.  I'm not surprised it was a rollercoaster.

Kale Hyder: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But is that all in the past now, in terms of the depressive episodes?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  From a sadness of, "Oh, I can't walk this far.  Oh, my hands…"  It's more today of like, "Okay, well that is what it is, how are we going to accommodate what I need to do?  Do I need to pull out the scooter and we can ride on the scooter if we need to go for a mile walk?  Do we need to find a way to, you know, I want to eat a steak, but maybe the steak I can't cut; so, instead of just not ordering the steak, hey, could you cut the steak for me?" finding ways that I can still do what I want to do, where before I would have been, "No, not going to do these things because I can't do them, I'm not going to use my accommodations, I'm not going to use my scooter, ask for help, I'm just going to just try to do everything independently", which I think is noble, but you miss out on a lot of experiences because of it.

Peter McCormack: Are you still in physio; is this an ongoing thing?

Kale Hyder: So, I do most of my work on my own now.  They do want me to come back every so often to check in, because I've done therapy for years so I know what I need to work on, but it's always nice to have someone who's trained in it to be like, "You could be doing that movement better".  And, when I'm lifting, I don't have a 360 view of my body, so I could be lifting wrong, or doing an exercise or movement wrong.  So, it is nice to go back to therapy and have them recommend different movements, or have them check on my walking and tell me, "This could be better".

Peter McCormack: When you said you'd go on the scooter maybe if it's like a mile, is that because it's too tiring to walk that far?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, so it's a combination of fatigue, and that fatigue can become dangerous too, because if you get too tired and you take a misstep, then maybe you fall, and that fall, sometimes you can just get up, but sometimes that fall might hurt.  Then you're injured, maybe you hurt your knee or your leg.  So it's kind of, "Okay, I know this is going to be fatiguing", it's out of precaution.  But also, I just want to live --

Peter McCormack: Don't waste the energy, yeah.

Kale Hyder: -- I don't want to really have to focus on -- maybe when I get there, I can walk around but in order to get there, I'm just going to use the tools at my disposal so that I can enjoy.

Peter McCormack: And is it like you need a plan, or like when you plan on coming to do this trip, you're flying in, you've got to get here to where we are, do you have to sit down and make a plan in advance, or do you just kind of know what you've got to do?

Kale Hyder: So now, I know what I need to do, but that's only because I've had these similar instances over time where I know I need to get to the airport, I need to usually ask for wheelchair assist, because I know that getting through the security is going to be pretty brutal because they're going to be like, "What's this brace?  Why do you have this on you?  Why do you need this?  What's in your backpack?"  So, I usually need assistance to get through there, otherwise they're going to be questioning me, padding me down, thinking I'm bringing on, you know, "What's that; is that a bomb on your leg?"  "No".  "Okay, we're still going to swipe it to make sure there's no metal".  They kind of treat me like I'm a cattle or animal because they're not sure how to handle me.  So, I use that wheelchair assist so that I can get through easily.

Then from there, it's just pretty status quo.  I usually will ask for preboarding so that I can make sure I get on easily and don't have people pushing me from behind trying to get on.  So, there are things that I've built in, but it's only because I've done them so many times.  But you do have to plan.  Part of this is planning and making sure you have your bases covered as much as possible, so that you're not in a situation where something could go wrong, or maybe you're by yourself and you fall in the street and you can't get up; it's making sure that everything is planned a little to a tee, which can be exhausting, but it's just to make sure everything goes smoothly.

Peter McCormack: And where you are physically now, looking forward, have you got specific goals of certain places you want to get to?

Kale Hyder: I think physically, I'm content.  I do want to build strength, not because I really want to run or jump.  That would be cool, but it's really like I want to limit fatigue in my daily life.  If I want to go on that mile walk, or maybe I want to go hiking on a mountain, how am I going to take a scooter on a rock?  So, maybe it's so that I can have those types of experiences.  Maybe I want to do all of my lifting and walking so that I can go and maybe swim.  I don't think I've swum in seven or eight years, because I'd probably just sink!  It's things like that where I want to do it so that I can have experiences, not because I want to run just so I can say to everyone, "I can run"; it's so that if Caroline and I want to go hike, sure, let's go hike.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm surprised you haven't swum.  I would have thought water therapy would have been a thing.

Kale Hyder: Oh, it is.  Water therapy was a big part of my recovery.  The first time I walked was in the pool because of the weightlessness of it.  But it wasn't like throw you into the 10-foot pool.  It was like, "We have a 5-foot pool here, 6-foot pool here, and we're going to walk", and even a few years ago, I was doing warm water therapy where they have a treadmill and the therapist would help me run in there.  So, it is pretty cool, but it's not like I'm going into a lake and just swimming!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean maybe eventually.

Kale Hyder: Maybe, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you got a basketball out yet?

Kale Hyder: So, I have but it's not really a desire of mine.  You would have thought that -- maybe you don't.

Peter McCormack: I assumed you still want to.

Kale Hyder: You still want to, yeah.  No, it's fallen away as…  So, here's an important part of this progression.  So, over time, as I -- let me tell a quick story, or tangent.  So, up until 2019, at that point it had been four years of doing really well in therapy, but mentally I was still in the same place as that kid who sat in the driveway, where I don't want to do anything, I'm too nervous to do anything, I'm just going to play it safe, sit at home, not really do a whole lot.

Fast-forward to 2019, I meet Caroline, and she kind of really just obliterates all of those insecurities.  So, let's roll through those.  So, when I met her, I did not want to use my scooter, I did not want anyone to see my leg braces, so I would wear pants in the summer when it's 95°, I would wear pants so no one would see my braces.  I would not use my scooter, which meant I was really fatigued just walking a couple of blocks.  I wasn't using any accommodations because I felt it made me look weak and when I'm trying to date someone, I don't want to look weak.  So, she comes along and essentially she questions all of these things.

Peter McCormack: Where did you meet?

Kale Hyder: So, we met online.  We both go to the same school.  I graduated, but we go to the same school.  I was nervous she'd look at my hands weird and all of these things.  Then, she just didn't care.

Peter McCormack: Did you know each other beforehand though?

Kale Hyder: No.  So, some of these insecurities that I had, she either was neutral about, or she was like, "I really like the way that your hands are, because they give nice back scratches", and stuff like that.  So, I have a list of insecurities here; she just destroys it.  So, at that point, I'm a neuro major at Hopkins, so I don't care, it is what it is.  But supposedly, it's one of the better schools for studying neuroscience, I'm going to become a neurologist because I'm going to cure paralysis, and the reason I'm going to cure paralysis is because I'm so unhappy and discontent that if I can just cure it --

Peter McCormack: I mean, you've answered the question I was going to put to you.

Kale Hyder: Oh, yeah?  So, instead of just mentally recovering, I'm going to cure paralysis.  And then, when I can run around and swim then, hell yeah, I'm going to go and play basketball again, I'm going to be just fine.  But then, in comes this girl and we have this list of insecurities she blows out of the water.  Then I'm like, oh, she's like, "Let's go do this, let's go do that, let's go to DC, let's go to New York, let's go to Philadelphia".  We start doing all of these things, I'm no longer sitting at home, I'm living life.  So, I no longer really have these insecurities, so I grow in my self-confidence, in my self-worth, and we're also doing things.  Why do I need to do neuroscience?  I don't like neuroscience! 

I like talking to you about some of these things, but that's not what I'm doing in school.  In school, I'm like, "Okay, dopamine B turns into dopamine A when it meets this factor".  I'm like, "I don't care, I couldn't care less".  It's not this high level, "Let's have a nice chat about it".  So, I didn't really like that, I'm like, "I'm actually kind of miserable on this neuroscience thing".  That allows me to, "What am I actually interested in?" and that's how I rolled into Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I think it's the biggest intro to Bitcoin we've ever done!  If we're like, "What's your Bitcoin story?" how long have we been going?

Danny Knowles: 1 hour 20.

Peter McCormack: Holy fuck!  Yeah, that's funny because most of our shows are about an hour to an hour-and-a-half, hour 15.  I usually look to Danny to get a nod, give me the time, and it's usually about an hour, and I haven't even looked.  Okay, so Caroline stopped you curing --

Kale Hyder: She did!  You can thank -- everyone in the world can thank her for that!

Peter McCormack: Okay, because that was the question I was going to ask.  Part of me was thinking, okay, you studied neuroscience, the expectation was you want to understand what's happened to you and maybe this has become your mission.  But actually, it doesn't feel like that any more, it feels like that was a mask.

Kale Hyder: It was a coping mechanism.  It was, "I'm going to figure this out".  What I would do as a kid, or not a kid, as a 16- or 17-year-old, I would read academic research papers on the spinal cord, or I would take neuroscience online courses from YouTube, just because I would rather try to -- and I didn't really enjoy it, I just felt forced to do it.  And at the same time, it was being reinforced by others like, "Oh, that's a really good mission, Kale, you're going to cure paralysis".  I was like, "Okay, yeah, sure".  I'll use this as, everything happened to me because I'm going to go and cure paralysis.  But the only reason I wanted to do that was because of my discontent.  Once that discontent fell away, I was like, "I'm not really interested in that.  What am I interested in?" 

Then somehow, that did lead me here to Bitcoin.  And from Bitcoin it's like, "I really like this monetary theory, this Austrian stuff, I really like this libertarian angle on politics and viewpoint of the world".  I like this meat side of being carnivore, I was like, "What is this Jimmy Song and Robert Breedlove; what are they doing; why are they eating meat; they're just weirdos?"  And then I started eating meat and it was great and I felt better and I was doing better in my therapy at home.  So, that's kind of how I got here.  As soon as I could work through my feelings of my injury, which Caroline helped; once I could work through those feelings then I could ask myself, "What am I really interested in?"

I'll tell you, it feels much better talking to you right now or reading articles or watching different podcasts and learning about this space, than it was really trying to drill into a subject that really I was only there out of coping.

Peter McCormack: Sometimes, we build up these coping mechanisms and they just bridge us from one place to the next.  If you hadn't have done that course, you wouldn't have met Caroline?

Kale Hyder: No, because I wouldn't have gone to Hopkins.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so there's these bridges in life.  I've had a coping mechanism in my life where it was cocaine and that was a terrible coping mechanism for dealing with divorce.  It's a bad one, it's a drug that could have killed me, right.  But sometimes you just find them and they bridge you from one part of your life to the next, and I'd find it hard to judge; it is what it is.  You did it, I don't think it's surprising that somebody with a spinal injury goes and studies neuroscience.  I can imagine that it's quite common that people with any kind of injury as a kid go and study that; I imagine it's quite common.

Kale Hyder: It is.  I think some people, they really want to do it though.  Before my injury -- I'm scared of needles, I'm scared of blood.

Peter McCormack: Well, what did you want to do before that, outside of the basketball; what did you think you would want to do?

Kale Hyder: So, when I was at middle school, I won the science fair several times with my renewable energy wind turbines, so I was going to be a wind turbine, renewable energy engineer; that's what I was going to be.

Peter McCormack: It's funny, the little parts of this story.

Kale Hyder: It is, because now that's a contentious debate to this space.

Peter McCormack: So, how did you discover the Bitcoin thing?

Kale Hyder: I discovered Bitcoin obviously in the runup of 2020, and I was watching a lot of CNBC, you know, our good folks over there, whatever!  But I heard about it.  I actually heard about it in high school, probably in the 2017 runup, but I had no idea what I was even doing then.  So, this 2020 I was more primed, because at that point, I was working a campus job, I was investing in stocks because I'm like, "I'm a stock picker"!

Peter McCormack: We've all done that!

Kale Hyder: "Look at this therapy company; look at this neuro company.  I'm really going to make a lot of money here".  So, I was predisposed to Bitcoin at that point, because I had $100 and I was like, "All right, I'm going to put this $10 in this Apple stock!"  And the 2020 runup, I started looking into it and of course, I shitcoined for a long time.

Peter McCormack: We all have our time!

Kale Hyder: Yeah, because it was really interesting, the whole space was really interesting.  But when you first come into it, you're not sure who's the signal and who's the grifters, you just don't know.  And especially in those bull cycles, I obviously hadn't been in one before, but in those bull cycles you don't know who's shitting to your face, essentially.  So, obviously I knew Bitcoin was going to be the main asset that I wanted to investigate, and thankfully I did dive into that.  I found your podcast, I found Lyn's work, I found Preston's podcast, all of these different places that to this day are still signal for me, so luckily I found those. 

But my goal was going to be to become an Ethereum engineer.  I was going to build something on Ethereum.  I also do have, I think it's still on, what's the NFT marketplace?

Peter McCormack: OpenSea?

Kale Hyder: OpenSea, yeah.  I have five NFTs.

Peter McCormack: You have?

Kale Hyder: Not that I bought, that I made.

Peter McCormack: I've been given an NFT, haven't I, a Bitcoin NFT?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I've still never seen or accessed it.

Danny Knowles: Have you still got the Opendime?

Peter McCormack: I think so, for that.  I don't even know what the fuck to do with the Opendime.  And I bought my son a T-shirt for Christmas that came with an NFT, I didn't know it did, but I still don't understand them.

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  But anyway, I have five or six.

Peter McCormack: What's the floor price of them?

Kale Hyder: Like zero; the lowest it could be!  They've never been bought or traded.  But actually, that NFT collection is called Disabled Punks.  And what I was trying to do with that, my goal was to create all of these -- they were actually really cool designs.  I made them out of pixel art, and they're all these different people who have disabilities.  One girl, she was blind and she has a seeing-eye dog, so it's this pixelated girl with a white dog.  And for each one, I wrote a story about this girl with this seeing-eye dog.  My goal was obviously to trade it and get money, but also someone could buy -- oh, there it is!  Yeah, look at that!  There's the girl with the seeing-eye dog, Disabled Punk #002.

Peter McCormack: Did you sell any of them?

Kale Hyder: No.

Peter McCormack: The strange thing is, it sounds like the kind of thing that could have blown up.

Kale Hyder: It could have, yeah.  But each one has a story, so if you click on it, it will say the description.  Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, "Disabled Punk is a blind teenager who uses her seeing-eye dog, Benji, to independently move from place to place.  As a child, the…?"

Kale Hyder: Essentially blind from birth.

Peter McCormack: Oh, "…congenitally blind teen mainly relied on her friends and family to navigate her environment.  However, one year ago, she adopted Benji, now a nearly 3-year-old white poodle, to increase her confidence and independence when on the move".  What I can't tell with this, because spending a bit of time with you, I can't tell if that's a nice story, or there's a little bit tongue-in-cheek there.

Kale Hyder: No, these were all supposed to be disability empowerment.

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Kale Hyder: So, each one was supposed to be -- so that first one, the girl with the seeing-eye dog, she relied on her friends and family, but then she increased her independence by getting a seeing-eye dog.  So, it was supposed to be disability empowerment.  Someone who was blind and maybe related to the story would buy it and hold on to it, because they felt it represented them, and then I would also make money.

Danny Knowles: I bet you sell one now.

Kale Hyder: Please don't buy it!  I don't even know how this works.

Peter McCormack: Danny, do you know what I mean by, it feels like, knowing his sense of humour now, there feels like an edge to that?

Danny Knowles: I don't know.

Peter McCormack: Not that you're taking the piss out of people, but because you've been through something, you can do this.  But no, they're just deadly serious.  Who's this guy?

Kale Hyder: Oh, this was an older man who fractured his hip and his gait, or his walking, was unstable following the surgery, so he uses his cane.  And he didn't want others to pity him, so he was initially against the cane, but now he's come to appreciate the freedom and stability the cane provides.  So, all of these have --

Peter McCormack: They've all got a little bit of you in them.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, the goal of all of them is, this person used the tools at their disposal in order to live their life more.  So, each of these, I hate that they're NFTs, because I think the idea is actually --

Peter McCormack: These are books.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, these are all little stories, right.  But the last story, not to toot my own horn, but it's really nice, "He relies on the cane to get around the house, go grocery shopping and most importantly, spend time with his granddaughter".

Peter McCormack: They feel like little kids' books.  How much are they, Danny?

Danny Knowles: I don't know how you even know.

Kale Hyder: I don't even know how to -- zero total volume.  I think number #004 is me; I made #004 after me.

Peter McCormack: "Make Offer".  Oh, so you have to make -- you see, I don't know how this shit works.  I bet these will sell now.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think so.

Peter McCormack: I might sell them and resell them! 

Kale Hyder: Wouldn't it be cool though if we had -- I hate that the OpenSea and Ethereum and Polygon, it all feels like such grifts now.  I wish I could do something like this, because I had a really fun time making these and I felt like they were really empowering.  My whole goal is, I would love to tell my story for a living and make things like this, but this just feels grifty; it feels like I'm trying to get some ETH for an art thing, and I don't like that.

Peter McCormack: Well, so like I say, I mean I've only read two of them, but they felt like parts of your story, like Benji was basically your friend, you've got the old guy who doesn't want the pity; they're things you've brought up.  But they just feel like little kids' books, that's what they feel like, and that's not grifty.  Have you thought of trying a kids' book?

Kale Hyder: A kids' book, or I've thought about writing my whole story.  I realise I haven't done that because I'm still working through parts of it and I need the help of others to help me piece some of those things together.  But I think a kids' book would be interesting.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean if you want to write, there's a bit of time to go on your story yet.  I just think they -- as somebody who has kids, who's been through story time, there are certain stories you go through, you have a character and then they tell a different story, and they're always in a set, there's always a series.  There's these certain books when they're so little, they have different textures for you to feel as you go through, and I think there's one that's a dog, one that's a cat and he catches -- and as they get older, there's different ones.  It just feels like one of those as a series.

Kale Hyder: I think that's a good idea.

Peter McCormack: Do it.

Kale Hyder: Because, I mean that's what I want to do, I want people who have disabilities to feel empowered, to go and live their lives, be productive, spend time with family, go out.  I don't want them to be how I was, just sat in my basement by myself, because that's no way to live and there's no reason to do that.  There's accommodations out there that you could more easily go out and you can build your social network and social support to do these things.

Peter McCormack: I think it would be very hard to go through that experience and not go through that period though.  You'd have to be a strong fucker to get through it all.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, and I'm glad I'm on the other side of that.  But yeah, now I'm really into the -- for me, I'm now most interested in this Bitcoin rabbit hole and all of these different tangents that I've found, because there's not just -- bitcoiners aren't a monolith.  There are people like Matt Odell on the tech side; but there's people like Texas Slim who accepts Bitcoin, but has Bitcoin principles of proof of work from a standpoint of, "We're going to raise cattle as ethically and as good for the people who are going to eat it, as good for the environment as possible".  That's proof of work, that's taking ideas from Bitcoin and applying it to other spaces.

Peter McCormack: It's like our bacon today.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Kale Hyder: What bacon did you get?

Peter McCormack: We went to the supermarket to get some stuff, right, and American supermarkets are full of shit.  Like, we have shit in ours, but get away from the fruit and veg and there's stuff that shouldn't be shit that's full of shit.  So, we ended up buying the no hormone --

Danny Knowles: It was no hormone, no antibiotic bacon.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and Danny was like, "If you're in the UK, you don't have those labels", because --

Danny Knowles: You just assume it's not got that stuff in it, or maybe I'm wrong, maybe it is in it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's so much shit on the shelves there.  Everything looks like it's kind of got a little bit of food in and a bunch of other shit that they can legally get away with.  And it doesn't matter whether it's frozen waffles, or tinned concentrate orange juice, or weird ice cream; it's just shit everywhere and it's fucking expensive here.  Like a pack of mushrooms was $5.  That, in the UK, would be like £1.50, like $2.  It's really expensive, but there's a lot of shit there as well.

That, to us, was an eye-opener, and I think we have better food in our general supermarkets in the UK at a better price than here.  But I've also noticed this push to make you grow your own food a bit more, and I get it because I think it's shit here.  And I don't mean that disrespectfully to Americans, I just think that corporate America, the food side of corporate America will just sell you any bollocks.

Kale Hyder: Yeah.  And if you go and you pick up one package from one part of the store and you pick up a package from another part of the store, 90% of the ingredients are going to be exactly the same.  So really, you're just eating the same ingredients, just packaged differently.  One has a mum in an apron looking out onto a field; and the other one has, I don't know, another beautiful image.  You think you're eating two different things but really all you're eating is high-fructose corn syrup, soya bean oil, soy lecithin, and that's about it.

Peter McCormack: Preservative.

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen that wheel where it's all the companies, and five companies dominate all the different products?

Kale Hyder: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Have you seen that?

Danny Knowles: No, I've seen similar stuff though.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's not good.

Kale Hyder: I haven't been to the grocery store.  Caroline and I, we rarely go.  I think the only time we need something from the grocery store is if we need a granola bar, or something that we don't want to make a meal.  We're not perfect, we don't want to make a meal, maybe we need something to tide us over until lunch; we'll get as best a bar as possible.  But the rest of our items, I have found a way to source locally and from farmers and ranchers that I trust. 

So back home, I have two farmers, one that I get all of my beef, steak, eggs from; and the other one that I get all of my dairy from, so all of my cheeses, all of my milks, you name it, honey, it comes from him.  I'm from Iowa, so there's this farm out there, Acorn Bluff, and they have this really good pork and I order from them to send me their sausages, their bacon, their pork chops.  So, I'm set from a nutrition standpoint and Caroline and I have both moved more toward, we want to eat food where the only ingredient is the food.  What is steak?  Steak.  What is broccoli?  Broccoli.  What is milk?  Milk.  If you go into the store, the last thing I want to buy is something where there's 20 ingredients and each ingredient has five ingredients.  So, you're really eating 100 different things, you don't know what you're eating, you don't know how it was processed.

We've really created our own supply chains and eventually I'm going to press them on accepting Bitcoin, because it's not just because I'm a bitcoiner, I want them to accept Bitcoin, but I think it will benefit their business; because right now, all of these places, they have that 2% to 3% charge from credit card companies on all of their orders, which eat into their margins.

Peter McCormack: Sure, but I always struggle with that one.  It's like, yeah, they have that 2% to 3% but then, are you going to sell the Bitcoin where you've got a charge on the exchange; if you're going to hold it, what if the price drops?  I think there's a bigger role in this with trying to get them to accept Bitcoin, is that it advertises them to bitcoiners, but you start to create this network of companies and people who think a bit similarly.

I eat probably slightly worse food than you, but I'm aware of what I'm eating more and more because of the Bitcoin community, because I've heard people talk about -- I'm not a carnivore, but I eat more steak because I heard about that and I've done my research.  I've just become more aware of the lifestyle choices from the community.  So, I think it's more about this kind of…

One of the really interesting things for me about Bitcoin is not the monetary side, it is the asymmetric topics which you learn about that are about living.  It's the time preference stuff, like make better choices, eat better food, exercise better, spend time with your family, educate people on the right subjects.  It's all that stuff that comes together.

Kale Hyder: All the principles.

Peter McCormack: All the principles, and we don't have to share them all.  But you can create that community around that and that's what I find super-interesting.  It's like why I wanted to get you on here.  It's like, okay, I could have seen any tweet thread from anyone who's been through a situation and come on.  But it's like, "Okay, but Kale's a bitcoiner, I want to hear what a bitcoiner's been through with this.  What does that mean and what comes next?" which out of interest, what does come next?  Are you working now or are you still studying?

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I'm working.

Peter McCormack: In Bitcoin?

Kale Hyder: One day.

Peter McCormack: One day, yeah.

Kale Hyder: Right now, I'm doing commodities trading operations at an investment bank.

Peter McCormack: So, you are a trader?

Kale Hyder: Well, I assist traders really.  It would be nice to eventually be a trader, I think that would be really interesting.  Right now, I do enjoy what I do because it's a lot of problem-solving.  Essentially, we support commodities traders, so people who trade power, they trade oil, or they trade corn all throughout North America.  And it's essentially making sure that everything is booked properly and our records reflect the counterparties and the exchanges.  A lot of time, shit goes sideways and we have to figure out what goes wrong. 

But I do enjoy this space, because I feel like there is a connection to the mining space, because mining is made up of a bunch of -- mining is all power markets, it's getting the cheapest electricity, so I'm learning a lot about power markets, electricity, all of these different things that I think eventually will allow me to be an applicant considered for some of these Bitcoin roles, or a role at a Bitcoin company.  I think that would be really cool, because I think the thing that's missing for me is I want to work for someone who maybe more aligns with my principles, or what this space has taught me.  I think that would be really interesting.

Peter McCormack: And, have you mixed much in the space, have you been to many events, are you coming to Bitcoin 2023?

Kale Hyder: I don't have any plans, but maybe I should.

Peter McCormack: Maybe you should.

Kale Hyder: I think I need to do a little more…  My whole thing is, anything I do, I don't want it to be ingenuine.  I don't want to go to something with a thought in my mind of, "I'm going to try to get something from this person".  I want it to be genuine connections and if it leads to something, great, but if not I have a friend at the end.  But I think it would be cool to go to -- I think what's lacking in Baltimore right now is we don't have meetups as much and I need to make one.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, dude, come on.

Kale Hyder: I know I'm lacking.

Peter McCormack: We've got one in Bedford now!

Kale Hyder: Yeah, I know, you guys have one.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you should come to the conference, just come, hang out anyway, just because it's cool; we'll be there.

Kale Hyder: You know when it is?

Peter McCormack: May.

Danny Knowles: I think 18 May, I could be wrong on the date.

Kale Hyder: Miami?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  You should come down to it, I think you'd enjoy it.  You will get a bunch of people get in touch after doing this, it always happens, just I don't know, want to speak to you and just say, "Enjoyed the show", or maybe didn't enjoy it.  But you will get people getting in touch with you from this.  Just to close out, how do you reflect on the last seven, seven-and-a-half years; how do you reflect on it all now?

Kale Hyder: I look at it now as, one, the greatest problem-solving exercise I'll probably ever have to do in my life, where I was given a situation and my goal was to do as best I could with that situation.  And the best I could at the beginning looks a lot different than it does now, meaning in the beginning, I thought the best that I could was walking, running, playing basketball.  Now, it's doing everything I can to live a fulfilling life, work at a job that I find fulfilling, build a family, build wealth that I can pass on, live by the principles that I've learned from this space of, you know, proof of work is working incredibly hard, being very detailed, but also it's a community, so it's really supporting others.  You see a bitcoiner who's doing something, they have those same principles and values, it's supporting them.

So, it was the greatest problem-solving exercise I've been through.  I've also learned that when we go through challenges, we need support and a range of support.  My parents did so much for me, I needed more people than just them, I couldn't rely exclusively on them.  Caroline's helped me in ways that my parents couldn't help me; my parents helped me in ways that other people haven't been able to help me.  You need a community and a tribe if you're working through something that is tough or an incredibly dense situation.

Then, I think the last part, what I completely didn't take into account or ignored, is when I first started trying to recover, I thought it was only a physical gain.  As long as I can recover everything as much as possible, get back to running, walking, then I will be happy.  I didn't really appreciate that my happiness was in my control then.  I didn't need to wait 15 years until I could maybe jump or run.  I could be happy then, I could figure out a way to go do things that I wanted to do, and I think that's a message I want to push.

Having a disability is not the end, it's not the end of your life.  It may be the end of certain ways you used to do things, maybe you're not going to write with your right hand anymore, maybe you're going to write with your left hand; you're going to do things differently and you're going to learn what you need to do.  But you need to continue living, you need to find ways, new hobbies maybe, maybe you'll continue your old hobbies.  Maybe you liked reading before, you'll continue reading now.  But maybe if you had really physical activities before and you don't want to do those any more, then you need to really reflect and figure out what you like, and that will come with time. 

I didn't just find Bitcoin in 2015; that would be nice, I would have told my family to buy a shit ton and then would have been done, everyone could be wealthy in my family, but that didn't happen; it took several years.  But once that did happen, now I'm ready to go, I want to capitalise on all these opportunities, learn from all these smart people, get in contact and talk to people like you.  So, I think that's how I reflect on it all and I'm excited moving forward.

Peter McCormack: Excellent.  And if people want to follow you, get in touch?

Kale Hyder: Twitter @kalehyder.

Peter McCormack: Okay, well we will put that in the show notes.  Dude, it's great to meet you.

Kale Hyder: Yeah, it's great to meet you.

Peter McCormack: I'm really glad you came in and we did this.  Yeah, it's like everything I expected.  I kind of got a feel for you from your thread, and I didn't see you as competitive as you are, but that's probably a good thing.  Yeah, thanks, man.  I appreciate you coming in.  If I asked any dumb questions, I apologise, but that's what I'm known for!

Kale Hyder: And I'm still working through a lot of things.  So, if we talked again in two, three years, I'll have more time to reflect on some of those.  You know, I think having this conversation, Caroline and I are going to talk after.  She'll be like, "That inspiration part, you really need to work though.  What are your actual thoughts on that?" because she can lay that out much more succinctly than I can.  But me being in this spot, sometimes I do feel like, okay, I've been through something that could inspire someone, so I could see that.  There are still things like that that I need to really understand for my own self, but then when I'm trying to talk, I can more clearly express those feelings to other people.

Peter McCormack: But that's just life.  I mean, Caroline will reflect on her own things in her life, Danny does, I do.  I mean, I'll reflect on this show and like, "What did I do?"  That's I think what we all should do.  Maybe not everyone does, but we all do that.  But yeah, look, it's great to meet you.  You're a friend of the show.  Anything you need, you just reach out to me or Danny, and yeah, it would be great to do this again some time, see where you are in a year or so.  Maybe working in a Bitcoin company.

Kale Hyder: I hope!

Peter McCormack: Shall we give a shoutout to mum and dad?

Kale Hyder: Yes, let's shoutout mum and dad, they're definitely going to watch this.  I could never give them enough credit.  My mum stopped her entire life to be there for me that first six months to two years.  And my dad did everything he could to continue the financial strength of our family, because all of that travelling, all of those expenses, I'm sure weren't entirely covered by insurance.  There were things that I'm sure they had conversations behind closed doors like, "How are we going to do this?  How are we going to make sure Adam", my younger brother, "is still okay and can have some sense of normalcy?"

I was going through what I was going through, but they had to make sure that we remained intact, emotionally and financially, and huge props to them.  The main thing I learned from them is the importance of being an advocate.  They went to battle.  There was a conversation they had with my doctor at the very beginning where my doctor told them, just them, that I was not going to walk or progress as much as what they thought.  And because of that, he was like, "Okay, maybe we could do this infusion, maybe we don't need to work and do as much extensive therapy, because I've seen this before.  It doesn't really look like something your son will be able to recover very much from", and they were essentially like, "Hell, no, we're going to do what we need to do here to give Kale the best opportunity to have more function".

I was a kid, I could do as much as I could, but it was on them to make sure that everything was as okay as possible, and I think they did a remarkable job.

Peter McCormack: Amazing.  Okay, man, well listen, like I say, stay in touch.  Anything you need, reach out to us and we'll see you when we see you, I guess, maybe at Bitcoin 2023, maybe in a year on the show, whatever, man.  But yeah, good luck with everything, and I appreciate you coming on.

Kale Hyder: Thanks, Peter.