WBD677 Audio Transcription
From Footballer to Bitcoiner with Conor Okus
Release date: Wednesday 28th June
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Conor Okus. 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.
Conor Okus is Product Manager at Spiral. In this interview, we discuss his journey from being a footballer to becoming a Bitcoiner, Real Bedford and the alignment of Bitcoin with a grassroots football club, his current role at Spiral managing the grant programme for developers, and his view on the benefits of open source development of Bitcoin.
“I don’t think Lightning was ever the scaling solution be-all and end-all; but, represents one of many scaling solutions that we’re going to have to do anyway.”
— Conor Okus
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Conor Okus, how are you doing, man?
Conor Okus: I'm good, how are you?
Peter McCormack: I'm all right, why are you late?
Conor Okus: I was late?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you were late, why were you late?
Conor Okus: It's 12.00pm start and I arrived at 12.00pm, man.
Peter McCormack: You're the big man! No, you were five minutes late.
Conor Okus: It's the Miami heat, man, sometimes it slows you down.
Peter McCormack: Literally the only one who's been late this whole trip, isn't he?
Danny Knowles: The only one.
Peter McCormack: The only one. We nearly cancelled you.
Conor Okus: And I'm the least notable guest as well, no one knows who I am as well, so I've got no right to be doing that as well.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but you're my favourite!
Conor Okus: I'm sorry, man.
Peter McCormack: No, I'm fucking with you, you're my favourite, man! It's good to see you.
Conor Okus: Yeah, you too, man.
Peter McCormack: So, we heard you're a really likeable guy!
Conor Okus: Okay! From good sources?
Peter McCormack: I mean, you're the source.
Conor Okus: I'm the source?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you called yourself, "A likeable guy"!
Conor Okus: Did I really? When did I do that? I didn't do that. Did I genuinely do that?
Danny Knowles: Well, someone did it.
Peter McCormack: Someone did it, but it was said in the first person on the Spiral website.
Conor Okus: Oh, really?
Peter McCormack: "I'm a likeable guy".
Conor Okus: I mean, yeah, that's probably our creative guy who's come up with that.
Peter McCormack: You are an annoyingly likeable guy, though.
Conor Okus: Seriously?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, man, you are annoyingly likeable.
Conor Okus: I mean, it's not a bad trait to have.
Peter McCormack: No, it's a great trait.
Conor Okus: It's not a bad trait to have.
Peter McCormack: You're a good guy. I might get to know you, man.
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And thank you for all your help with Real Bedford.
Conor Okus: Do you know what? I've got so much FOMO though, man, because I've moved from London to Miami and being able to see you guys celebrate and stuff in person, I'm not going to lie, it brings the tears to my eyes not to be there. That first trophy, those first two trophies, seeing the lads what they've been able to achieve this year. Because I mean, the journey started last year, I was playing for the team and all of that kind of stuff. And to see where it's gone on, it's crazy, man. And it's just getting started as well. Most people don't know it's just getting started. And for me to bring the football and the Bitcoin together, it's like, if you would have told me five, six, seven years ago, would this be my career, I'd be like, "What are you on about?"
Peter McCormack: Well, you were there from the start pretty much.
Conor Okus: Pretty much, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, was it Steve Lee got in touch?
Conor Okus: Yeah. As soon as" you tweeted about you're buying a football club, I was like, I've still got a bit of legs in me". Whether I'm participating on the field or off the field with the Bitcoin stuff, I'm like, "I need to be involved somehow".
Peter McCormack: Well, he got in touch, he said, "You've got to meet Conor, Conor Okus", and I googled you and I'm like, "Oh, West Ham? All right". And then, was it me and Connor met you?
Conor Okus: Yeah, before the Tottenham vs Liverpool game, I came with my friend, we just sat down had a coffee in Edmonton, good old Edmonton, and yeah, just discussing football, your plans, how we can help.
Peter McCormack: You got it from the start, right?
Conor Okus: Yeah, 100%.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and you're the only player who played for us who got paid in Bitcoin.
Conor Okus: I know, right? So, I can go down in history to some degree, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, people are like, "Are the players getting paid in Bitcoin?" I'm like, "They don't give a fuck about Bitcoin!" That's not true actually now.
Conor Okus: They should, though.
Peter McCormack: I know that.
Conor Okus: We need to sit them down and be like, "Lads. Even if it's 10%, 20%, start thinking about it, yeah".
Peter McCormack: Knighty is, Knighty asked me about it.
Conor Okus: Okay.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Knighty's buying Bitcoin and I think he's buying some shitcoins as well, but a couple of them asked. What we're going to do this year, we're going to do the tipping during a game, if a player scores.
Conor Okus: Okay, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I mean, it favours the goal scorers or man of the match, but we're going to flash up QR codes, tip the players. I think that's going to be cool.
Conor Okus: That will be amazing, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I don't think many -- I think when I first announced it, nobody got it. I think some people who like football kind of get it, but I still think a lot of people right now, there'll be people listening going, "What the fuck are you talking about football for? Talk about Bitcoin". I don't think they fully grok what we're trying to do here. How would you explain it to a bitcoiner who doesn't give a shit about football?
Conor Okus: No, to be honest, the Bitcoin is very much secondary to what you're trying to do anyway. When you come down to the club, if you're not a bitcoiner or into Bitcoin, you probably wouldn't even really notice that there's a lot of Bitcoin initiatives underpinning what the football club are doing. So, from that perspective, it's just a grassroots football club trying to do the right things, grow the community, move up the leagues in a sustainable fashion. It just so happens that Bitcoin is being used in a number of different ways, from a treasury reserve asset, to helping the community understand how they can accept Bitcoin, to educational efforts. So, Bitcoin represents a secondary part of the football club. It is a football club first and foremost.
Peter McCormack: Absolutely.
Conor Okus: And that's what you're trying to do, right? But you know some big people in the Bitcoin space who can help with sponsorships and help get the word out, and kind of leveraging the fact that Bitcoin is a grassroots movement. The club you've acquired so happens to be at the very grassroots of football, the two are kind of merging, you get to leverage this kind of worldwide fan base as well. I know you've mentioned it a few times as well, how you can compare it to El Salvador and it being very much an underdog. So, Bitcoiners are kind of attracted to the story of Real Bedford as well.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, what I've said to people is when people are like, "I want to do something with Bitcoin, I want to get into Bitcoin", it's like, "Bring it into what you do or know".
Conor Okus: Exactly, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Michael Peterson brought it into a community in El Salvador where he was trying to help kids. He was on a mission, he was trying to help kids get away from gangs, he brought Bitcoin into that; in Austin, they've created the Bitcoin Commons for local business to use it; Perth Heat, they brought it into their baseball team; I brought it into a football team; someone can do a rugby team; you can find a young swimmer, you can sponsor them. You can bring Bitcoin into anything you're doing and just make it part of it.
But what I think always happens is, if you bring Bitcoin into what you do, every four years you have a competitive advantage of everyone else. You just have that thing that clicks through. Plus it's also a hack. You have this global community to tap into. All the people who like football who like Bitcoin, they're like, "Real Bedford, that's my team".
Conor Okus: Literally. And just culturally as well. I mean, if you can go to a game and you can pay for your beer in Bitcoin or pay for your tea in Bitcoin, it's a way of introducing people to Bitcoin without forcing it down their throats. So, when you start seeing music merge with Bitcoin, sports merge with Bitcoin, all of these different avenues, it kind of just becomes part of the norm slowly but surely, and people don't really realise it. And in 10 years, 15 years, of course, when I'm traveling from El Salvador to Bedford to watch a game, I don't need British pounds. I just --
Peter McCormack: Turn up with my Bitcoin.
Conor Okus: -- just top up with my Bitcoin, go to watch a game, buy a tea, beer, whatever, and it's just normal, you know?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think a lot of people actually think we're going to get in the Premier League. I think they're convinced.
Conor Okus: They don't realise how tough it is!
Peter McCormack: No!
Conor Okus: Do you know, I'm watching Man City and thinking, football's kicked on as well, man. You really need a lot of money to compete at the highest of levels now. And whether or not we'll have that war chest come 15, 20 years from now, hopefully Bitcoin does what we think it might do pricewise and that represents a hefty sum of money to spend on players, stadiums, all that kind of good stuff. But yeah, footballers need a lot of money to compete at the highest level now. But maybe not even the highest level. Even look at Wrexham. I was watching Wrexham the other day. I'm like...
Peter McCormack: Well, their wage bill must have been £2.5 million, £3 million.
Conor Okus: I'm like, this is Conference League football. When I was playing football ten years ago, if you were playing in the Conference, you were on a couple of hundred pounds a week. Now, players are getting a couple of grand a week to play fourth, fifth tier English football.
Peter McCormack: Hold on isn't Mullin on £8,000, £10,000 a week, or something?
Conor Okus: Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but also I think they'll go straight up again, because I think League Two is kind of a dip down. The top of League Two is not as competitive as the top of the Conference.
Conor Okus: No. You see a lot of teams getting back-to-back promotions that do Conference League Two. Even League One, it can be done, but League One onwards, it starts getting a bit more difficult, I think.
Peter McCormack: I think Wrexham will be in the Premier League within a decade. If they stay interested and keep pushing it, they've got the local support, they can build out the stadium, they've got commercial interest that's driving forward. I think they can do it. I think of us as the small version of them. Our competitive advantage is, whatever's in our treasury, every four years it might do a 5X. So, say we had £1 million in there, it could be £5 million, then £25 million, and so on. And so in 20 years, maybe we are in the Football League trying to get in the Championship. We could be in a better financial position than them, but we also have this global community.
Conor Okus: Yeah, how are you managing, even just the financial side, just to make sure the club stays sensible and doesn't overdo it on the financial side, because even a couple of leagues above where we're at, clubs are paying players silly money; how are you thinking about managing?
Peter McCormack: You just have a budget. I've written the budget. My goal every year is not necessarily to have the biggest budget, but just to have a budget that can put you in contention for promotion. So, we've got to be able to have a go. I don't want to sit around and it might change. If we get step three or step two, it might be like, "Well, hold on a second. We've got to breathe for a bit and breathe for a year or two". But momentum is super important, building this story is super-important, engaging with sponsors is super-important, but it's just a business, Conor.
It's like, all the successful clubs out there who haven't just got a chairman throwing money in, how do they do it? They're a well-run business. So, they have big crowds, they have good sponsors and then they have revenue lines outside of the club. So, for example, I'm thinking ahead and I'm thinking what I need is I need an academy, I need 3G pitches for the players to train on and then that can be rented out, I need youth football and parents coming along, I need a gym that I can have the players use.
Conor Okus: Online media presence, streaming.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think sponsoring us now… So, if you look at the teams you can sponsor in the non-league, I think we are, in terms of awareness, forget Wrexham, but I would say we are comparable to most non-league teams, if not more.
Conor Okus: In terms of awareness, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think you know in terms of awareness, look at a Boreham Wood, they're known in England, right. But outside of the playoffs, who's paying attention to them? They get a bit of attention because Arsenal ladies play there and they're a great run club. I use them as an example because I look at them as where I want to be. But I also think if you sponsor us, we've got this whole awareness with a whole other community, we've got the BBC writing about us. So, any other team in step five, four, three, we're a way better prospect to sponsor.
Conor Okus: I'll give you the Hashtag as well.
Peter McCormack: Hashtag's another one, yeah, actually, and they've done a good job.
Danny Knowles: Are they the Fan Token NFT club?
Conor Okus: No, no.
Peter McCormack: No, that's Crawley Town.
Danny Knowles: Oh, yeah.
Peter McCormack: We'll talk about them. This is the perfect Bitcoin v shitcoin. No, Hashtag is, what's his name; Spencer? Yeah, he's a huge, super-successful YouTuber, started this team, Hashtag, they're doing well. Did they just win step four?
Conor Okus: They did, yeah.
Peter McCormack: They smashed it, they've gone up to step three.
Conor Okus: And they started off as an online gaming team, I believe, so they don't have a physical location. And from what I understand, they chose somewhere in North London as their home ground, I forget the name of the club now, Harrow is it? Haringey Borough, as their home ground. So, I think they've even got a bit of flexibility to change where their home location is and stuff like that.
Peter McCormack: I talked to Spencer about this. I think that's their only downside, is when you see their name you go, well where are you?
Conor Okus: Yeah, exactly.
Peter McCormack: With Bedford, people know we're Bedford, people have a place to go, they have a location to wear anything to get behind. But what they have that other people don't, wherever they go for an away game, all the people who like Hashtag or like Spencer or like their e-gaming platform come and watch them. We had their ladies play our ladies in the FA Cup. We had a bunch of these e-gaming nerds turn up in the Hashtag Clubs. They love it!
Conor Okus: Yeah, cool.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there is this new wave of teams that are doing a bit different, like us, them.
Conor Okus: There's even Sunday League teams that have got a following now, man. I don't know if you've heard of Baiteze, Baiteze Squad. They're a Sunday team, and they won the Sunday League version of the FA Cup. And they've got hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and stuff. It reminds me of when I was young and I used to watch Renford Rejects. I don't know if you've ever seen it.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I remember that, yeah! It was a kids' TV show.
Conor Okus: On Nickelodeon. Renford Rejects was this five-a-side team that were so many different characters, and they just used to go around playing Sunday football. But they've got some really good players that they take from non-league and they play Sunday football and it's more of a -- it's almost reality TV football in a way, so it's more on the entertainment side. But there are so many different avenues now that football's going in.
Peter McCormack: Dorking have done it well with their, what is it, the name of their YouTube; Bunch of something-or-others?
Conor Okus: Yeah, I know what you're talking about, I don't know the name though.
Peter McCormack: They've had the most promotions of any team. They started at the bottom of Sunday League, went all the way up through Sunday League, Saturday League, and now they're in the Conference.
Danny Knowles: That's very cool.
Peter McCormack: The Chairman is the Manager, has been all the way through. He's kind of funny. I think the Jersey Devils, or what are they called; Jersey something have done well?
Conor Okus: I don't know.
Peter McCormack: But the truth is, there is a hack now if you create a team around an idea rather than a town, you can be more competitive, and I think some teams are going to struggle.
Conor Okus: But uniquely maybe in England, Europe, I've watched a couple of games here in the States and I don't know, it's a different vibe. My friend Paco Craig, he's the captain of Miami FC, so I went to watch him versus Inter Miami in their version of the FA Cup, I guess. One, the atmosphere is just not the same; two, the standard of football isn't as good as I thought it would be. I actually thought the MLS has come on a lot more than it has. Maybe it was just those two teams.
Peter McCormack: Do you know why that is? Because whenever you saw the MLS, you saw highlights, and they've got some amazing players and, like, you'll see Ibrahimović do something incredible, or Rooney. And I think it's an 11-a-side version of five-a-side.
Conor Okus: Yeah, it's just they don't have relegation, promotion, the whole franchise system. I don't know the knock-on effects it has for the quality of the football, how fans actually patronise their teams and stuff, it's just a completely different vibe. So, I'm thankful for what we have back home, you know.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's a great opportunity. And I think, you know, you said how are we going to manage the money? We're trying to be sustainable. But we're running a startup, we're over-invested, we've got to spend £280,000 this summer. We got to put in new floodlights, new perimeter fence, two new stands. There's a whole bunch of stuff we do, it's expensive. And if we didn't have the backing of the Bitcoin community and sponsors, we wouldn't be able to get promoted because we wouldn't get our ground grading. It's a lot of pressure.
The ladies, I can tell you this because this isn't going to come out for a while; so, Bedford Girls and Ladies are going to become Real Bedford Ladies next season. We've got 250 girls and ladies playing under the Real Bedford brand next season, so that's going to be cool. We need to do the same on boys' football, but I think we've just got to build the revenue and make sure we don't overspend, leave some money in the bank if things get tough, and just keep telling that story and, yeah, build a community in Bedford. And, you know, I think we've had a good first year.
Conor Okus: When Real Bedford versus El Salvador national team? That's what I want to know! That would be your vibe.
Peter McCormack: I think they would kick our arse right now!
Conor Okus: Probably!
Peter McCormack: I don't know what level that would be. Would a Championship side give them a game, or a League One side?
Conor Okus: Yeah, I reckon a Championship League One, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we can't knock over that much in Crawley Town, because that's who you asked about. So, that's the shitcoin team.
Danny Knowles: But that's the difference between them.
Conor Okus: But wasn't it Barnsley?
Peter McCormack: No, it's Crawley. No, Barnsley nearly took the HEX sponsorship, and then everyone went mental at them and they stopped it.
Conor Okus: Yeah, I remember that.
Peter McCormack: No, Crawley town was essentially bought by a shitcoin version of me. He's this guy who's made all his money on NFTs, he says he's going to get them in the Premier League. He said the same stuff, right, but the difference was, he forced the crypto down their throats. All we do is have a meetup and you can come if you want, and that's it. He was selling NFTs to the fans, which obviously didn't make any money.
Conor Okus: That's crazy.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he didn't know what he was doing, he kept sacking managers, then he went in the dugout. Was he in the dugout? Yeah, you can't do that shit.
Conor Okus: No, no.
Peter McCormack: They just avoided relegation. Did they finish third from bottom?
Danny Knowles: I'm not sure, but that's the difference between a grift and just a community movement, isn't it?
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: You're not asking for anything from anyone, it's just, "Come along and support the club".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but he's an American coming into English football not getting it.
Conor Okus: He doesn't get the culture around football, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I didn't get the culture of non-league by the way. I didn't understand it until this.
Conor Okus: What's been the biggest surprise though?
Peter McCormack: Biggest surprise? That's a good question.
Conor Okus: What did you think it was?
Peter McCormack: Well, I guess I didn't realise how much you need volunteers to support it.
Conor Okus: Okay.
Peter McCormack: That's a really important part of it. I didn't realise how much the next-door neighbours would see us as a rivalry, and shit they would give us. I didn't realise how much pressure it would be once it gets going. I mean, we're 12 points clear and I'm like, "Yeah, but if we lose that and they win that, we can fuck this up". It's like, winning leagues is -- have you won a league?
Conor Okus: No.
Peter McCormack: It's hard.
Conor Okus: It's hard, man.
Peter McCormack: It's really, really hard. And people talk about the money we've spent.
Conor Okus: Do you know why it's hard at non-league as well? Because the players are part-time. So, for anyone who doesn't know, non-league footballers typically have a full-time job and they'll be playing football on the side or part-time. So, they'll train twice a week, sometimes once a week, and have a game on a Saturday or a Tuesday. So, at our level, a lot of players are not actually paid. And so, as a manager or a coach, if someone says they've got to go to work on a Tuesday night because that's how they feed their family, you can't tell them, "No, you need to come and play for me".
So, as a manager at that level, you've got to deal with managing players' work commitments, kids and all of that kind of stuff, if you're not paying them significant amounts to offset the money they'd make working, for example.
Peter McCormack: And sometimes they miss because there's a wedding, they go to a wedding.
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: You're not at that level where they can go, "I can't come".
Conor Okus: Because the players typically are not on contract, it's a non-contract basis. So, if someone says, "I'm going on holiday", as the manager you're kind of like --
Peter McCormack: Well, that's where all the credit goes to Rob Sinclair, the manager, he got them down and said, "This is the goal", and we had just this relentless approach to winning, doing everything right. Everything behind the scenes we did, we tried -- like the website, the season tickets, refreshments for the players. Every single thing we did we tried to do the best we can, the programmes, and it was a lot of work and we go again now.
Conor Okus: I guess as well, seeing the non-league and seeing how in certain instances, it's so non-professional, there's so much room for us to set a standard of how things should be done as well.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think that's what bothers the neighbours, Bedford town -- there's some people there, they won't be listening to this, I hope not, maybe that Mark Stephenson will be, stalks me -- but is that they've had a monopoly on football in Bedford for a long time because they're the bigger team. They've got the crowds and they've done a great job, but we've come in with a new plan that's different from theirs. It's more competitive and so it's a threat to them. But the truth is, we're doing things that they like, even if they fucking hate us, they can at least go, "Wow, they're good at their marketing, they're good at their branding, what they've done with women's football is great". You have to at least appreciate what we're trying to do. And it's going to suck for them.
Conor Okus: You're bringing people to Bedford who have really no reason to come to Bedford, to be honest. Was it late last year, maybe early this year, we had people from Czechoslovakia?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Slovakia. We had 12 guys fly in from Slovakia --
Conor Okus: To come watch a Bedford game. I mean, I don't know if that's happened before, I'll be honest; I doubt it!
Peter McCormack: The last game, we had a handful from the US. We had probably 15 to 20 people who flew in for that game, maybe more, but they're staying at the local hotels, spending money in the local shops. It's good for Bedford and Bedford is a micro version of Wrexham. Wrexham is on the global map now, this little Welsh town, well not little but this Welsh town, which it's been through its tough times both with the football and the economy, is on the map. They have Hollywood stars coming to Wrexham to watch football matches. It's great for them.
We are a micro version of that. We have, I don't want to say Bitcoin stars, but you know what I mean, we have bitcoiners coming to Bedford spending money. Bedford's on the map. And so, you know what my biggest surprise is, God, this might get me in trouble, how hard the authorities, football authorities make things for people unnecessarily.
Conor Okus: Okay, bureaucracy?
Peter McCormack: Bureaucracy, and --
Conor Okus: It's kind of old-school mentality, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "This is the way it's always been done". I don't care. You know, the administration of the systems, that's been a surprise. And we've felt a pushback against us. We stream the games; well they had to have --
Conor Okus: It's a bit more flashy, especially at this level. What is it, step 6?
Peter McCormack: It was.
Conor Okus: It was step 6; step 5 next year.
Peter McCormack: But streaming the games, you had to have a whole new set of policies written for streaming the games.
Conor Okus: Oh, really?
Peter McCormack: That was surprising, and also actually how hostile other clubs are to you, they're really hostile. We're nice, we treat people well, but they're hostile towards us unnecessarily.
Conor Okus: It just makes winning that much sweeter, I guess sometimes, doesn't it?
Peter McCormack: There were a couple of results this year that were pretty sweet. But no, man, listen, I fucking love it, I love it. The people are probably thinking, why am I talking to you about football. You should give me your background. How did you go from professional footballer to massive nerd?
Conor Okus: That's a good question, man. So, I've always played football, from the age of 8. I joined West Ham United, was my local team, in East London. I used to live next to the training ground actually. My friend knocked for me one time, he was the son of the manager of the local football team, called Lakeview, and one day he was just like, "Oh, do you want to come out and play out?" And we just used to play football in the streets and stuff like that. And I played for the local Sunday team, his dad was the manager, and I got scouted by West Ham by playing for that team. And I used to live literally next door to West Ham's training ground in Chadwell Heath. So, played for West Ham from the age of 8 to 18, 19. Got let go, got released.
Peter McCormack: Did you get any first-team games?
Conor Okus: No, but I was training with the first team at 16.
Peter McCormack: Really? Who were you training with?
Conor Okus: So, this is when Gianfranco Zola was the manager. And this was the era, period of --
Peter McCormack: Hold on, for anyone listening who doesn't know, Gianfranco Zola is a fucking legend of football, Chelsea legend.
Conor Okus: Yeah. He would play in training and be the best player. Because at the time, he was still in his early 40s, he could move, he could... He was the best player in training, no joke. But I was training with the first team at 16, and at 16 I didn't know how big a deal that was, because that was the era of Carlos Tevez, Javier Mascherano.
Peter McCormack: You were trading with Tevez?
Conor Okus: Yeah, so it's kind of like, at the time, I didn't know how much of a big deal it was though. And I didn't have the mentality required to push on. And what I mean by that is, I'm a 16-year-old thinking, "Oh, I'm training with the first team". But you need to go in there as a 16-year-old like, "I'm training with the first team and I'm going to take Carlos Tevez's place". But I wasn't thinking, I was just like, "I'm happy to be here, I must be doing okay". I wasn't like some of my peers who are kind of at my age group like, I to big him up, Jonjo Shelvey. He's got that mentality where at 16, he was playing in Charlton's first team and it was like, "I'm the man at 16". And not every player can have that at 16, 17.
I didn't necessarily have that. Maybe going on later in my career, I would have developed that. But at the time, I was there based on how good I was, skill-wise. I was the best player in my team, and they saw a lot of potential in me skill-wise, but at the time I didn't necessarily realise the kind of grit and selfless determination that you need if you want to play in that environment. Because, these lads are in mature men. They see a 16-year-old, they're going to kick you and lift you up in the air. They don't care. You're on the same level playing field as them, and they're not going to let a 16, 17-year-old take their place.
So, admittedly, going into the first team at 16 wasn't a very welcoming experience. And, I don't know, maybe some clubs they welcome their youngsters a bit better. West Ham wasn't like that. We were fighting relegation, the mood in the training grounds, not very lively, so perhaps that was part of it. But yeah, got let go, went to play for Dagenham and Redbridge in League One, which is a League One side, completely changed my outlook on football. The style of football is completely different. Like John Steel, channel football, kick the ball down the channel. It's almost like playing a different sport. It's like playing rugby. I'm a central midfielder, so I'm doing that most of the game.
Before joining Dagenham and Redbridge, I didn't even know what a channel ball was, I didn't even know what it was. I'd come from West Ham where we were playing tippy-tappy football, Zola, everyone. So, we had that heritage of playing good football. When you go down the leagues, back then, the standard of football goes down. But nowadays, people in League One and League Two want to play how Man City are playing. Keeper gets it out from the back, play to right back; it's completely different now. But back then, no, it was channel, get on the second ball, try and score a goal.
Peter McCormack: How many years were you at Dagenham?
Conor Okus: Two years.
Peter McCormack: And were you a regular?
Conor Okus: No, I was kind of in and out, reserve. So, I wasn't a regular there.
Peter McCormack: Any big games though; big cup games?
Conor Okus: One FA Cup game against, I forget now, Newbury something. I forget. It was an FA Cup game, but I forget who it was. But yeah, didn't get much first-team football there either.
Peter McCormack: Score any bangers?
Conor Okus: No, I didn't score any bangers, no. But I played with a lot of good players, like Dwight Gill, who was at Newcastle, I think at Stoke now; played with a lot of good players. And kind of just fell out of love with it, if I'm honest. It was a combination of injuries and fell out of love with it. And this was in my early 20s. Shoutout to my parents, they made me study A-levels while I was actually playing as well, so I had the grades to go to university. I kind of self-taught myself English language, psychology and economics very randomly, so I had that to fall back on. And I went to university at Goldsmiths, University of London, studied computer science and the rest was history. I went to uni to study something practical. I thought I didn't want to, no disrespect to these degrees or nothing, but I didn't want to study art or history or anything like that. I wanted something where it was kind of hands-on and looking into the future.
Peter McCormack: What did you do, computer science?
Conor Okus: So, I did computer science. And then when I finished my degree, spent a few years working as a software engineer and then found my way into Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: How did that happen?
Conor Okus: 2017, one of my colleagues was just like, "You need to buy some Bitcoin". It was bull market, came for the money, stayed for the technology and all that good stuff. So, that's pretty much how it happened for me. I think because I had the technology background, I was like, I'm going to go and learn a bit more about Bitcoin. Watched a lot of Andreas Antonopoulos' videos, read his content. So, I come from that school of Bitcoin, you know? I can imagine the new people coming into Bitcoin, they've got very different voices telling them what Bitcoin is.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Conor Okus: Whereas, back then for me, Andreas was very pivotal in my learning about what Bitcoin was, both from a political, financial, geographical, social, political, technological point of view. So, I actually had a very rounded view of Bitcoin, whereas perhaps some people coming in now, it's purely price, price, number go up. I don't know, maybe that's not a fair criticism.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think some people coming in now don't know who Andreas Antonopoulos is, and he was fundamental to all of us. You watch that first, whatever first Andreas video it is you watch and you're like, "Wow, who the fuck's this guy?" And then you go to another one and another one. And I've had the pleasure of being able to sit down with him in person, not even on interviews. I remember I was in, I think I was in Uruguay with him; was I in Uruguay with him? We just sat down and we talked, and not just about Bitcoin, but about handling online comments, things like that. I think he's amazing. I miss him so much being a prominent vocal person in Bitcoin.
Conor Okus: Yeah, I mean it's good to have new characters, new voices, new narratives come in the space for sure, but he's definitely one of the most well-rounded bitcoiners in terms of education, because he does the deep dive on the technology as well and can help you get started if you're someone who wants to purely focus on the tech as well. So, yeah, definitely miss his active presence. I know he's still he's still doing stuff.
Peter McCormack: He does his Patreon stuff.
Conor Okus: Yeah he does his Patreon stuff and I guess he's a bit less in the public eye, for whatever reason, but yeah, if you don't know about Andreas then, I don't know, man, you've been sleeping, you need to go back and do some studying, some homework!
Peter McCormack: Get on fucking YouTube and Google him.
Conor Okus: Yeah, 100%.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so then you end up at Spiral?
Conor Okus: Yeah, so 2020 was the year I was working as a software engineer in a corporate environment, or a start-up, and I wanted to get into Bitcoin somehow. So, I volunteered at Advancing Bitcoin, which is a conference in London. Leon Johnson organises that, he does a great job with that.
Peter McCormack: He does.
Conor Okus: So, I just volunteered, asked, "Do you need any help with that?" That was beginning of 2020, right before the pandemic hit and stuff. And then summer of 2020, I was given opportunity to have a grant from Square Crypto at the time, or Spiral now, to work on some open-source Bitcoin projects, so everything from Bitcoin design, which we can talk a little bit about in a minute, some developer libraries to improve developer experience, some educational stuff with Hello Bitcoin, and that was six months. Steve Lee reached out to me to get that done. And then after six months, I was given the opportunity to join the Square Crypto Spiral team full time.
So now, I manage the grant programme that I was a recipient of during that period. So, I've seen it from both sides. So, always on the lookout for talented people who want to work on free, open-source Bitcoin projects. So, currently I think we've got about 35, 36 active developers, designers, PMs, all working on free, open-source Bitcoin projects from all over the world, geographically dispersed, working on everything from Lightning infrastructure to security to privacy stuff, all mainly based around non-custodial stuff as well.
Peter McCormack: How do you choose who to fund? Do you internally have certain areas you think need focus; or do you just look at every application independently?
Conor Okus: We definitely look at every application independently, but we're predominantly looking at things that improve decentralisation, improve privacy, security, user experience, scalability, that kind of stuff. So, we have a full-time team focused on the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), which is a kit to help improve non-custodial Lightning adoption. We have some PMs as well. But yeah, we look at each application independent. We review it, I'll review it, Steve will review it, the wider team will review it sometimes as well. And if it meets our criteria and has some level of consensus among the community as well, we'll give that person no-strings-attached funding to work on their project for a year, 12 months initially.
Peter McCormack: Do you monitor them, or just say, "Here's your money, see you later"?
Conor Okus: We loosely monitor them. All the work is open source, right, so most of the work is being conducted on GitHub. So, we can kind of monitor what's going on on GitHub, but we don't require them to report into us every week or bi-weekly or quarterly or anything like that. The people that do the grants are typically quite self-motivated to manage themselves, work at the intensity they want to, work geographically from where they want to, they have flexibility there as well. So, no, we're not into the business of micromanaging people, especially when we've got 36, 37 people doing lots of different stuff.
Peter McCormack: It's so mad that this software is able to be developed globally through a decentralised group of people who just say, "I want to work on this bit, I want to work on that bit". And I still don't even understand how it all coordinates, who checks; is it led from the core at the top and they're kind of creating? The reason I'm getting to is, if this was a company, you would have reporting lines, you'd have procedures, everyone would know it; how does that work in a decentralised way?
Conor Okus: Yeah, how do you get that kind of order amongst chaos? It's a really good question. So, I think the people need to understand as well that the Bitcoin development technology ecosystem is very wide. So, Bitcoin Core, obviously the most important software in Bitcoin, but you also have infrastructure-based projects, you also have wallets, you also have software development kits. And these are all very important projects as well. Typically, a lot of these projects will have lead maintainers who have been working on the project for some period of time. So, for example, the LDK was initially started by Matt Corallo. I think you've had him on.
Peter McCormack: He was on here the other day.
Conor Okus: Yeah, he was on here the other day. He started that as Rust Lightning. So, he's been working on Bitcoin basically forever, and he has a lot of Bitcoin expertise, a lot of Lightning expertise. So, he's someone that people look up to in the project. And it's the same for other types of projects, like the Bitcoin Development Kit (BDK), which is a sister project to LDK. But typically, developers have an idea of what specific contribution they want to make. And if it happens to align with the direction the community is going, that community specifically and the wider Bitcoin community, then there isn't usually much challenge to getting that contribution merged in or part of the next feature set for a release.
So, there is though definitely a need for active project management as well. I have spoken to a lot of developers and they have found themselves working in a silo, because although you're geographically dispersed all over the world, you don't have an office to go into, like you say, like a manager to tell you, "We're doing X, Y, and Z", and notify you of how someone else's work might affect your work, you're kind of working in a silo, to some degree. So, there's definitely room and space for a PM. we kind of regard ourselves as decentralised PMs in a way, and we do some of that overseeing of the project in its entirety and kind of help tie everything together. But we can only do that by way of persuasion, because we're no one's actual manager.
Peter McCormack: Is the developer community growing?
Conor Okus: Oh, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Have we get more devs coming in; have we got enough coming in, or is it never enough?
Conor Okus: No, there's never enough, there's never enough, but the trajectory is definitely up and to the right, especially now, the stuff we find, like the BDK, the LDK, that gives you the tools and makes it easier to build on Bitcoin now in whatever language you come into. So, yeah, it's definitely a positive direction, 100%. And that's really exciting to see. You guys should definitely try and stay abreast of new wallets that are coming out, the Fedi wallet that's come out and the Mutiny team --
Peter McCormack: I heard that today.
Conor Okus: -- just released a wallet in the browser, which is fantastic because it's a superior onboarding experience, privacy preserving, doesn't require any KYC, doesn't require an app store to download the application or anything as well. So, all of these innovations are only made possible by some of the tooling that's being built.
Peter McCormack: Are you still coding?
Conor Okus: I code in non-production capacity. So, I code demos. So, if you're a developer and you just want to get started with BDK or LDK, then I can write a demo to show you how to get introduced to the SDK. But I'm nowhere good enough now to write production-level code or anything like that. But I don't know if you've seen it, but I do have a YouTube channel called Bitcoin Developers, where I sit with developers and live stream and we code and we will code up a wallet or a feature of a wallet. It's only 800 subscribers now, so I need to shill it a little bit.
Peter McCormack: You're such a fucking nerd!
Conor Okus: I need to shill it a little bit.
Peter McCormack: How can you be so cool and such a nerd at the same time?
Conor Okus: I don't know, man. I think people are surprised by me, but I don't know!
Peter McCormack: Shill it; where are we sending people?
Conor Okus: Bitcoin Developers, that's what it's called.
Peter McCormack: Go on YouTube, go and check it out.
Conor Okus: I've done well to get that name, to be fair, I'm going to try and grow it, try and -- because you should be able to go on YouTube and type in, "How to build a Bitcoin wallet", and you should see hundreds of videos on how to do it. That's the goal.
Peter McCormack: The Mutiny thing came up this morning and I was trying to check it out. By the way, cool name; Mutiny. Love it. Okay, let's talk about scaling. So, ordinals, we don't need to get into the yay or nays, I think whatever, it's here to stay so forget about it. Unless someone writes a BIP and gets rid of it. But we did notice that has highlighted firstly some bugs, Matt Corallo talked about it, but some limitations with Lightning. How do you feel about that?
Conor Okus: My grand take is that Lightning only scales an order of magnitude above on-chain Bitcoin currently. As it currently stands, there are a lot of challenges around Lightning, around if you want to have a smooth experience for the average user, around onboarding because of the channel management requirements, around inbound liquidity and all of this kind of stuff, managing your Lightning keys securely, receiving payments offline in an async fashion, and all of these things have been actively worked on and there are solutions to them. But again, Lightning only scales the order of magnitude above on-chain, and currently maybe Lightning acts as a supplementary technology to other stuff, such as Fedimint, some other Layer 2 scaling solution that comes along.
So, I don't think Lightning was ever the scaling solution, be-all and end-all, but represents one of many scaling solutions that we're going to have to do anyway.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, maybe you'll be the best person to ask this question to.
Conor Okus: Maybe not!
Peter McCormack: No, I reckon you've got this one. So, when the fees go really high and people start criticising it, one of the answers is, "Yeah, but Lightning, the fees are low". And I keep trying to imagine a scenario a couple of decades down the line where there's consistently high fees and some people get priced out at the basechain. It is a potential. If you had consistently $100 fees, most people aren't going to be using that. And I know people can get onto Lightning without being part of a channel, they can use somebody else's channel and all that. But my understanding is you can't really then be self-sovereign because you're reliant on the channel that somebody else has created. Is that true?
Conor Okus: Well, no, so it depends. So, we also have the concept of a Lightning Service Provider (LSP) now. I don't know if you're familiar with that, and the companies like Voltage and there's an open-source LSP spec as well, that c= are doing. Because right now, if you want to open a channel, you have the liquidity requirement. And if you want to be able to receive, you basically have to push a payment before you can receive one. So, that infrastructure is being put in place to be able to allow an average person, who doesn't want to do any challenge management, via a zero-confirmation inbound channel and be able to receive directly and have the liquidity initially tied up at the LSP end.
But if you are able to have the Lightning node running on a mobile phone and the keys managed by the individual, it's basically where the keys lie, essentially. So, as long as you have an environment where either a user is running their own Lightning node, like Umbrel or Raspiblitz, or the node's running on the phone, as long as the user has access to the keys and the application allows them to obviously close out, then I don't see a huge problem with it.
Peter McCormack: I was talking about Fedi, our boy Obi. Big shoutout to Obi. Took me a while to get my head around it. First time I heard about it I was like, "But I'm not holding my private keys", and it's, "Yeah, but you trust people in the community". We've just been told we can't trust Ledger, we can't trust them distributing keys with three disparate companies, but at the same time with Fedi, we say, "Well, we trust three guys in your local community". They're different risk factors, but we are trusting people and I was like, "I don't get this". But now, I'm starting to hear better examples and I do get it.
Conor Okus: Yeah, I listened to your podcast about that, it was amazing, yeah. Festivals…
Peter McCormack: Yeah, festivals. So, we're going to do our conference in Bedford next April, hopefully 800 to 1,000 people, we're like, "We'll just make it so we'll just create our own mint there", I don't know what you call it; do you call it a mint?
Danny Knowles: Federation.
Conor Okus: Yeah, Federation.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll have our own Federation there, maybe me and Danny will have the keys, we'll fucking rug you all! No, so we'll create it and then everyone can just privately transact at that whole event, completely private. And I was like, "That makes sense now. I get that". It's like when you go to a festival and you buy beer tokens and you go and grab your beers, you're essentially buying your e-cash tokens. So, I get that, I like that. Are you a fan of Fedi?
Conor Okus: Yeah. So, Spiral funds three developers working on the Fedimint protocol at the minute.
Peter McCormack: Nice.
Conor Okus: And, yeah, it's definitely, just from a perspective of, I know Obi talks a lot about the Global South and the mentality and the capabilities and the resources people have over there, it definitely seems from a scaling perspective, it can scale pretty much infinitely. And I like the idea of the kind of community banking style of doing things as well. I just downloaded the Fedi app the other day, and the Fedi app is just, I guess, going to be one client of the Fedimint protocol. I'm sure we're going to see many more iterations on top of it.
Peter McCormack: Is it live or is it a test flight?
Conor Okus: So, it's in Signet, actually. So, I think they're kind of pushing it more towards developers and builders, but you can get some test coins from Signet and play around with it. It's got an in-app chat feature as well. So, it looks like it's taking some similar feature sets from like a WeChat and stuff like that, which seems promising. But that community is growing as well. They've got a lot of design focused efforts as well to make the UX really strong around it as well.
Peter McCormack: We desperately need that.
Conor Okus: Yeah, so are you familiar -- we'll finish this and maybe we'll talk about the Bitcoin Design community as well, because I think you should get some designers on actually.
Peter McCormack: I'd love to.
Conor Okus: But yeah, so the UX is going to be fantastic. Yeah, I can't say anything more about Fedi.
Peter McCormack: But you guys are fully backing it?
Conor Okus: Yeah, we're big fans of Fedimint.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, like I say, I didn't get it at first.
Conor Okus: Yeah, because you had a few issues trying to get around that e-cash.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well the first thing is e-cash, I was like, "What's this e-cash?" I was like, "Oh, that's just Bitcoin, it's just a Bitcoin IOU". But when I was like, "You get these e-cash tokens --" and the funny thing was, you listen to me get it live in the show, and then we had a whole bunch of people email us and say, "Oh, I get it as well now, I didn't get it. What is it? You get these e-cash tokens…" no one really understood it.
Conor Okus: No, I mean when you get a chance, download it. You'll be like, "Oh, okay".
Peter McCormack: Oh, what's Signet? How do I do that?
Conor Okus: No, you don't have to do anything. You just go on the website, iPhone, download, and that's it. And you've used like a faucet before, right, to get --
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Conor Okus: So, you just go onto the faucet, paste your Lightning address, it will send you some coins, and you can start playing around. It's pretty impressive.
Peter McCormack: It's so funny, there used to be faucets where you could just go and get like --
Danny Knowles: 50 Bitcoin!
Peter McCormack: Yeah, 50 Bitcoin! Yeah, yeah, 50 Bitcoin.
Conor Okus: Yeah, now you can't even get testnet Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Definitely can't afford to buy 50 Bitcoin!
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Okay, let's talk about design. We'll finish off in design. Historically lacked, always lagged the tech side of things. I don't know why, don't even need to have a thesis on why, but it did. I have seen improvements, things are definitely getting better. What's been your approach at Spiral towards design?
Conor Okus: Yeah, so I think initially, the Spiral team wanted to hire an in-house designer, but we came to the conclusion that it'd probably be more impactful to create a design community. So, if people are interested in finding out more, they can go to bitcoin.design, and this is a community of primarily designers, artists, some creatives who are trying to tackle many of the UX challenges and problems we see in Bitcoin. And the kind of flagship project there is something called the Bitcoin Design Guide, which gives developers, product teams the tools they need to build quality user experiences within Bitcoin.
So, it tackles everything from how to display fee management for channel management, to self-custody solutions, to multisig. It's all really covered in the guide, and all of the principles and all that kind of stuff is really good. So, yeah, the community there is very active. I know you're a designer UX man as well, so you should definitely get some designers on to tell their story about Bitcoin, because open-source design as well is actually quite a new concept as well. Designers typically want to be in their corner and are a bit maybe shy or reserved about getting feedback on their creations and stuff. So, Bitcoin is actually leading the way in terms of open-source design efforts as well. And we're seeing a lot of collaboration between the designers and the open-source projects as well. Whether it be Zeus wallet, working with a designer in the community, or Fedimint, or we've had some desktop wallets in the past, Specter working with designers.
So, they also play the role of helping developers tell the story of new technological innovations. So, over the past year, we've had stuff like unified QR code, so the challenge of hiding Lightning from users. Lightning should just be a technology that people don't really know about, instead of maybe having this Bitcoin and Lightning tab, "Should I use Bitcoin? Should I use lightning? Fees are high here, fees are also high; what do I do as an average user?" Whereas the design space has come in and said, "Well, we can kind of unify that using the BIP21 standard. And here is how this UX is a lot better for people". So, they can help in those regards and they can help tell the story of new technological solutions as well. So, if a new privacy preserving protocol is on its way in, like PayJoin or something, how do you actually tell people about it, create a nice website around it, create a narrative around it, help people understand? So, they play that role as well.
Peter McCormack: It's so important. I remember the first multisig wallet I was shown was using Caravan.
Conor Okus: Oh, okay, yeah. Unchained, I think that was.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I was being walked through it with Phil Geiger, wasn't it, and I was like, "What the fuck is this?" They're like, "No, you put this here and you copy it". I was like, "Guys, this doesn't work".
Danny Knowles: Then they had a 2-of-3 multisig for a bet. Pete won the bet but lost his keys, so he couldn't sign it!
Peter McCormack: I did, I lost my fucking keys, because of bad design! But I recently just signed up with the Unchained Vault. They're a sponsor now, and so they onboarded me, they said, "You've got to see it". And it's fucking brilliant, it's so easy to use. And that's where you can compare the two and go, all right, here's a developer at home on their own creating something, or a couple of developers. Here's a company who've approached it thinking about being a consumer, and they've got the UX right. So, you really see those differences. But for a long time, Bitcoin stuff was really hard to use. And it's hard to grok Bitcoin.
Conor Okus: Yeah, it really is. And I think, yeah, when we get to the stage where the average person can just download a wallet, be easily onboarded, not have to worry about channel management, not have to worry about if they can receive offline, not have to worry about anything, then we're there. And I think it happens just gradually. I don't think there's going to be one day it's like, "Bitcoin's made it", right. It's going to be very gradual and kind of just merge its way silently into culture. And that's the way I want to see it personally. I don't want to see some big shift and the financial system collapses and we're all scrambling to start self-custodying, because I don't think that would be a good place to be in.
Peter McCormack: I agree.
Conor Okus: But if we can slowly start to do it, I think it's the right approach, I think.
Peter McCormack: All right. Unless there's anything else you want to talk about, the last thing we want to talk to you about is United are playing Chelsea today; do you think United could lose?
Conor Okus: No. Chelsea are shambles at the minute; Chelsea are an absolute shambles. I'm a Man United fan from East London, so don't give me any flak or anything.
Peter McCormack: There's no way they can lose today?
Conor Okus: No, there's no way they can lose today. I think Chelsea are done for the season. They're just washed up, they've got no motivation, there's nothing going on, so I think Man United...
Peter McCormack: If Chelsea do win today, just say they do, can United lose to Fulham on the last day?
Conor Okus: No, United are going to win every game for the rest of the season, including the FA Cup
Final!
Peter McCormack: You're so impartial, such impartial bullshit, completely impartial! Me and Danny have got a bet.
Conor Okus: What's the bet?
Danny Knowles: We've got four bets.
Peter McCormack: Four bets.
Conor Okus: You lot love a bet, by the way.
Peter McCormack: I love a bet; I usually win. What was the first one? The first one was Man U-Liverpool, the last game, you won 7-0.
Conor Okus: Okay, yeah.
Peter McCormack: But we made the bet and he's in Australia.
Danny Knowles: Are you Liverpool?
Conor Okus: No, I'm a United fan.
Peter McCormack: So, I bet Liverpool, he bet United. Anyway, he's in Australia, he goes to bed. Not only does he wake up to see he's lost the bet, he wakes up to see 7-0. He has to get his head around that!
Danny Knowles: And Twitter was blowing up, because he was absolutely loving it!
Peter McCormack: And then we had, what was the second bet? Was it top four, the second bet?
Danny Knowles: No, second bet was I bet Real Bedford wouldn't get 100 points.
Peter McCormack: Fucking 99 points we finished on.
Conor Okus: That's crazy. Is that a record, do you know?
Peter McCormack: No, there's one team that literally won every game apart from two, which they drew.
Conor Okus: Oh, okay.
Danny Knowles: But that was only with like four games to go, so it was close.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he got me on that one because of course I'm going to say we're going to win them all.
Conor Okus: I'm going to have to get in on some of these bets.
Peter McCormack: Then we drew with Fulham. And then I bet Liverpool would finish top four. By the way, each bet's 1 million sats.
Conor Okus: Okay.
Peter McCormack: And then, just being a twat, even though we were so far behind, I was like, "I'll bet you 1 million sats we finish above United", and we were like 12 points, 15 points behind at that point. But then we went on a run.
Conor Okus: I sense a football podcast coming from you, by the way!
Peter McCormack: Well, I've been thinking about it.
Conor Okus: You're going to have to do an offshoot or something, but I sense it, you know.
Peter McCormack: This might just end up being a football and Bitcoin podcast. Rogan's, what, MMA and comedians and weirdos. This might just become Bitcoin and football.
Conor Okus: It could work, man.
Peter McCormack: It might work. One week I have Conor Okus, next week I have Will Zaha.
Conor Okus: Yeah, I've got a lot of good football takes, trust me.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. To be honest, we could have talked about football for two hours, but the people listening would be like, "Shut the fuck up, I'm here for Bitcoin, I'm a nerd".
Conor Okus: I know, right?
Peter McCormack: All right, so you think as a Man U fan, you think I'm going to lose the bet. You're completely impartial?
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: I think in two hours, I'm going to be 2 million sets up.
Peter McCormack: Two hours?
Conor Okus: Yeah, it will be a 3.00pm kick-off, yeah.
Peter McCormack: A few hours, yeah.
Conor Okus: We're recording this live from Miami.
Peter McCormack: Live from Miami, Conor Okus.
Conor Okus: How did you find the conference actually?
Peter McCormack: I loved it, preferred it from last year because it was tighter. All the people whinging about it, shut up, you weren't there. 90% of the people moaning weren't there. It's like, "You weren't there, so what are you moaning about? What, you would have gone if it had been different? No, you wouldn't have". Also, the things they were moaning about, there's conferences for them that suit them and they don't even go to that, so shut up, start a conference, or don't go, just shut up.
Conor Okus: I personally prefer the more scaled-down conferences with a lot more high signal. Although the open-source stage was in the bleachers, behind the couch, under the trash can… no, I'm only joking. But yeah, I do prefer the smaller, more intimate setting.
Peter McCormack: I like them both. I like Honeybadger in Riga and I like this.
Conor Okus: I'll see you in Prague.
Peter McCormack: I'll see you in Prague, and I'll enjoy it. I think this is the thing about Bitcoin that people don't seem to understand, is that we need lots of different people doing lots of different stuff. Stop bitching about the stuff you don't like. If there's something not being done that you like, go and create it, go and make something. We need the big, commercial conference here, where you get the wider media interest. We also need the really niche ones you advance in Bitcoin, and we need the middle-of-the-road ones, which will be ours. On a podcast level, you need the more liberal British guy who likes football, as well as you need your Marty Bents, and you need your Matt Odells on your privacy, and you need your Stephan Livera on your libertarians; you need a wide net.
So, if you don't my podcast, don't fucking listen. Go and start one, or go and listen to the one you like. Don't bitch about it, there's people who like it.
Conor Okus: Well, they've moved it to Nashville next year, so we can ride bulls and shoot guns in Nashville next year!
Peter McCormack: Exactly, but if you don't like that, you can start --
Conor Okus: Don't go to Nashville!
Peter McCormack: If you're in fucking Atlanta, Georgia and you don't like this conference, start one in Atlanta, Georgia. Start a meetup, get 50 people there.
Conor Okus: TABConf, show up to TABConf; there's one.
Peter McCormack: TABConf, there you go. Or, wherever you are, just do something. Stop bitching and do something. I thought the conference was great. Would I have done it the same? No. Am I in any position to complain? No.
Conor Okus: You've got your one coming up next year.
Peter McCormack: I've got one coming up, yeah. Look, I said to David Bailey, I said on stage, "It's your 5th year, 6th year, whatever, you remain undefeated. No one's come to take your crown, no one's going to take your crown. Keep doing your thing, ignore the haters". It's always things that are successful get hated upon. Everyone will hate Man City now, they hated Man U, they hate this conference, they hate -- God, I'm not going to say me, but they hate Real Bedford, they hate Taylor Swift, anything successful they hate. All right, let's finish, tell us about your fight.
Conor Okus: 9 July.
Danny Knowles: Sorry, what's this?
Conor Okus: So, I like Muay Thai, I do Muay Thai.
Danny Knowles: Oh, I didn't know.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's a bad motherfucker.
Conor Okus: Yeah, so I'm going to do an amateur fight on 9 July.
Danny Knowles: Very cool.
Peter McCormack: When did you last fight?
Conor Okus: I don't know, mid last year, or something, just like inter-club.
Peter McCormack: What's your record?
Conor Okus: I've only done a couple of inter-clubs, like 2-0.
Peter McCormack: 2-0, so you won both?
Conor Okus: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Feeling good?
Conor Okus: Feeling good, yeah. I don't know why I'm doing it. I think I'm just doing it to keep fit, to be honest, since my football days are over. I've got to do something to keep this belly down, you know!
Peter McCormack: Tell me about it, seriously! I'm literally going to go back after this, I'm like, "Fuck, every trip I'm like, 'I've got to sort this out'", and I turn up in each location and I'm fatter each time.
Conor Okus: Yeah I'm going to try and get on the intermittent fasting.
Peter McCormack: Oh, tell him about that, Danny's just read a report.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, it's the widest-scale report they've ever done on intermittent fasting, and they reckon it probably makes you have a younger mortality. I don't know if it's true.
Conor Okus: It's what she's on!
Peter McCormack: I'm saying, "Oh, I probably shouldn't do it", as the guy who literally does everything that will lead to an early death. So, like, what's one more thing?
Conor Okus: I'm on that train.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but was it by like, some central body?
Danny Knowles: It's quite significant. I don't know who it was by.
Peter McCormack: You know people who listen will be like "NHS, fuck you".
Danny Knowles: You just stitched me up there, didn't you?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course I stitched you up! All right, Conor Okus, good luck in your fight. Good to see you, man. We'll see you in the UK soon?
Conor Okus: Yeah, 100%.
Peter McCormack: Thank you, we'll see you at Bedford.
Conor Okus: Thanks for having me, man.
