Bitcoin Is Quietly Replacing Land as a Store of Wealth

Let's be clear, Bitcoin is [music] an international asset. >> We are spending like drunken sailors. >> Bitcoin is the only economic entity where the [music] supply is unaffected by the demand. >> If you [music] want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert that currency into an asset that's [music] scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. [music] All right, welcome back to Scarce Assets. This week I'm joined by Vance Crowe who is the founder of Legacy Interviews. Vance, thank you for making the time. It's nice to meet you and appreciate the flexibility of some of the technical difficulties we just had. >> Anybody that's doing a podcast knows what uh what technical difficulties can do to your show. >> Yeah, you know, uh really appreciate it. I've been looking forward to this conversation. And right before we were uh we had hit record, we were talking a little bit about your background and I would love to just hear more about your upbringing and um you mentioned living in a small town in Illinois and having the agriculture background. Could we talk about that first before getting into some of the details around Bitcoin? >> Sure. Yeah. So, I um grew up in smalltown central Illinois and had no idea that later I would go to work for agriculture because when I was there, the only thing I wanted to do was get out of smalltown Illinois. And um I went on to college, I studied communication, and then I became a deckand on a ship. And that started me on a bunch of adventures just uh you know being a young guy trying to make enough money to pay off my student loans and figure out how to build the skills that you need to to make it in this world. So I ended up buying a house and renovating and selling it. I joined the Peace Corps and lived in Africa. My buddies and I ended up buying an old wooden yacht in Northern California and uh that it had a fire on it. So we pulled it out of the water and restored it. And then I got a master's degree in in negotiations from Satan Hall School of Diplomacy and then went to work at the World Bank. Um I was in DC for a couple of years, realized that wasn't for me. And uh my wife and I moved to St. Louis and I was offered a job with uh Monsanto, the very uh you know kind of dark and ominous place that people have heard of. And I worked there for 5 years before uh heading out on my own. I now run a company called Legacy Interviews where I record individuals and couples telling their life stories so that their future generations, their kids and their grandkids, great grandkids can know where they came from and the stories of their lives. >> That's fascinating. So, I would say an unconventional uh career path that you've taken. I'd be curious if you take us back to graduating college and and becoming a deck head. What how did you uh make that decision? Why didn't you pursue, you know, let's say a more conventional route? Well, I um was kind of meandering. You know, kids that go to study communications don't really have a strong plan. I had gone because I wanted to be a professional communicator. I like having ideas go from one person to another, seeing where that gap is. And when I got to college, I realized actually there is no field for this. You can study public relations, uh you can study marketing, but that's not actually communications. So, as I got close to the end of college, I was really worried about what I was going to do next. And my dad had me meet with an old friend of his, this 80-year-old man. We were sitting in this coffee shop and he said, "Vance, what do you want to do with your life?" And I, you know, gave the typical non-answers that a college kid gives. And then he said, "What do you what do you really care about? What do you want to be spending your time doing?" And I said, "All I want to do is travel and meet people from other cultures. That's all I care about." and he said, 'Okay, then you should find a job that brings you as close to that as you can as opposed to getting a job and then doing that for two weeks out of the year when you're when you have vacation. So, that really changed my whole frame. I sat down trying to find some job that required a college degree and I became a deckhand on a ship that uh traveled up and down the western um hemisphere. It was a small ecoourism ship and there I really got to see, you know, dockyards and shipping life and and a really important part of learning about how hard the world really is. >> Interesting. Yeah. You know, so that's actually great advice. Um I think so often people don't people do not follow a path that you did, right? they would maybe sit down with that 80-year-old man, hear some of his perspectives and advice on how to navigate the world and maybe not actually pursue it because the thought of going out there and not pursuing a conventional path, not doing the 9to-5, not having a retirement, you know, plan set up is scary for a lot of people, right? To your point, most people would go down that path and then take the two weeks out of the year to travel and see the world and meet people from different cultures. So it sounds like you um for whatever reason maybe Bitcoin ties into this conversation uh in a similar fashion to the degree that you don't actually pursue it sounds like the conventional path um at least from a career standpoint. >> Yeah, I would say that I am um particularly when I was younger, I had no fear. I probably should have had fear, you know, I was not worried about paying off my student loans. I was not worried about how am I going to find a wife. I really was searching for how am I going to do something that utilizes what I'm really interested in? How do people have complicated ideas? Why are there some people that are really smart, but other people just can't see it? And being on a ship was a perfect example of that. You would find these guys, they'd be from like Eastern Europe, and they would have these deep, thick accents, and they would talk really, you know, with really crass language. But you'd be like inside that guy, he knows how to make that engine work when things are on fire and smoke is filled into the room. Like that guy knows things. So how can I get out of him what he knows? And I think the shipping world really took me out of all the normal things that I had been around and showed me like, yeah, you really can figure out how to connect with people and build a relationship so they'll show you things that you would otherwise have no way of knowing. 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And it sounds like that would be a natural segue to talk a little bit. I wanted to talk about it at the end, but we should talk about it at the beginning of the show what you're what you're doing with Legacy Interviews because you'd also mentioned at some point during your discerning of what you wanted to do that you wanted to be a professional communicator, right? And and studying communications in college and to some degree being a podcaster is being a professional communicator and you're helping people tell their stories. So, how do you kind of think about Legacy Interviews and how that kind of fit into the trajectory that you've had in your life? >> Well, for the 5 years before I started Legacy Interviews, I was the uh awkwardly titled director of millennial engagement for Monsanto. And my job was to to address the very growing concern that young people had about how their food was grown, where it came from, what farmers were doing, what what major a companies were doing. And so I really thought, well, the best way to be a communicator is to be a professional speaker. And so I was going out and I was addressing huge uh audiences, college uh classrooms. Um I would get invited to different like skeptics in the pub events all over the United States, Canada, and Europe. But when Bearer bought Monsano, Bear came to me and said, "We love what you did with this program. Now we want to offer you an executive track. Would you like to go to supply chain or finance?" And I was like, I did not come here to become an executive at this company. I came here because it was a really interesting communications problem. So, I ended up leaving and um ultimately started Legacy Interviews not really knowing what I was doing. I I had a a podcast guest that stopped by my house with a book one time and he had his son with him and his son like his eyes got super big when he was when he heard my voice and he was like, "You're the guy on the radio." So, I was like, "Well, would you want to do a podcast?" And so there I was with a six-year-old with the cameras and the lights on, his little legs dangling over, and I asked him questions that uh only a six-year-old could answer, like, "What do you think your dad does all day at work?" And uh what food do you wish mom let you eat more of? Who's your best friend? I took the interview and I packaged it up and I sent it to his dad and said, "Play it for him sometime when you guys are in the truck." And um a couple months later, his dad called me up and said, "You know, Vance, I was at a party the other night and we were playing a game and a question came up. if you could only uh if your house were on fire and you could only save one thing, what would it be? He's like, I knew instantly it was the interview you did with my son because I can't go back and get it again. He's not six anymore. And if I'd have asked him those questions, I don't think he would have answered them in the same way. So, he's like, I don't know what you should do with this, but you should do something. And so, I went out on my podcast. It was about October. Um, and I said, "Hey, if anybody wants me to interview your parents or your grandparents or somebody for the holidays, let me know." And it was during COVID, so people weren't out and about. I thought I was going to get two or three. I got so many I couldn't get them all done. And that was when I was like, "Ah, here is the idea." And so now over the last now six years, um, we built it out. We have a studio. I have a team that does a great job of editing. Um, we're expanding into doing a lot of different areas with this. It's really been a a big growth market for us. >> That's incredible. So, the Tell me a little bit more about the main use case that that people have. I mean, I think it's such a beautiful idea, just the the the inception of the idea with having a six-year-old on the podcast and having that that asset that can just live forever, right? As long as it's digitally protected, of course, but the family, the the parents, grandparents, one day that child will be able to enjoy it as well for perhaps his children. And so I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about just the types of conversations that you tend to have, the motivations for people reaching out. Is it is it mostly just for having kind of a digital memory or collectible or how do you think about that as as running legacy interviews? >> Well, when I started, I thought, well, everybody wants to tell their story. So, I tried to market it directly to the older people that I thought were the right fit. you know, maybe they're somewhere between 65 to 85 and I would just go directly to them and I got almost no takers. But then it dawned on me actually what's going on here is the the people like you and me, we have kids and you are looking at your kids and you're looking at your parents and you realize by the time my child is old enough to know the value of hearing the stories from their grandparents, it might be too late. And so what we realized is we went straight out to people like our age and said, "Hey, uh, this is a way for you to be able to capture the stories that maybe you know and some of the ones that you don't know from your parents." And so people often will get it for their parents and then their parents when they are about to get the interview, they're like, "I don't know if I want to do this." And they're like, "Well, it's not really for you. It's for the grandkids." And you know, grandparents, all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, if it's for the grandkids, well then I'd be happy to do it." And so when I sit down in the interview, my goal is really to help unlock the stories that people want to tell that they either haven't found the right context or nobody's brought it up with them. So many of the things that shaped and formed our lives come from these experiences that we haven't revisited in 60 years. So when I sit down, we talk about uh five different areas. Their ancestry, their childhood, career, marriage and parenting, and then the wisdom that they've learned along the way. And in this um process, I try and ask questions that prompt people to tell stories. So instead of just saying, "Tell me about your parents," I might say, "Um, what rules were really important to your parents when you were growing up?" Or I might ask about um when you got a little bit of money put together, what did you spend it on? Because this all of a sudden draws people out to being like, "Oh, I remember the time I saved up all my money to go buy that dress and mom wouldn't let me wear it." Or you hear all of these experiences that that are really formative to people, but when you're sitting around at the holidays or you interact with your parents at family dinner once a week, they're just isn't that context to bring it all up. And I think that this kind of uniquely captures those people and then they share it within just their own families. So, it's for an audience of maybe six people, but it's a really neat way to do interviews. >> I love that for so many reasons, right? The the last part that you just touched on in terms of having just an audience of that of the family is so contrary to podcasting in general in most formats, right? In most formats, you're trying to get a message out to as many people as possible. In this format, you're trying to get a message out to the people you love the most. And so there's very little content that actually curates to that type of audience, which I think is incredible and it's a beautiful thing. I've actually thought about this myself as well, you know, personally before I I knew of Vance Crow, just having interviews with my parents just so I could look back on them, my children could look back on them as well. So maybe I'll be engaging with you and legacy interviews off air here to try to get the ship back on uh you know, ship um back on track here. So, I don't know how much context you had coming into this conversation, but we're a Bitcoin company. We focus on building out Bitcoin financial services. Our audience, investor base tends to be high net worth individuals, corporates, institutionals, and people love to hear perspectives like yours because they're unique. You don't necessarily I haven't seen Vance on the podcast circuit talking um to, you know, all the standard Bitcoin podcasts in the past six months. And so I think a lot of people are curious to hear more about your background. So we only spoke at a high level about some of the, you know, critical points along your career path or along your individual journey, but we didn't actually get into Bitcoin. So I'd love to hear exactly where Bitcoin came on your radar, at what point? What were you doing professionally at the time or personally? How did you hear about it? And and what stood out to you? So, I heard about Bitcoin back in 2013 when I had a good friend. Uh, I I tend to befriend people that are like very technically capable and maybe sometimes they're a little bit gruff. Maybe a lot of other people struggle to get along with them. And my buddy's name was Rob Long. And uh Rob had told me, "Hey man, I I bought this box and I plug it into the wall and it sends me money." And I was like, "What? That's ridiculous. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." And so three different times he tried to tell me. And then one night we went out, I think for my birthday, we were out with our wives. Um, none of us had kids at that time. And I was like, "All right, Rob, give it to me one more time." And somehow in the description he hit on my kind of inner Austrian, you know, economics belief system of imagine you had a money that could not be printed. And imagine that you could um take this thing that's digital and digital has always been able to be replicated. That's why it's valuable, but now you can't replicate it. And I all of a sudden started to have those aha moments, those those series of like where your eyes get really wide and you start to actually dream and imagine that this potential could be real. And so I started to get really into it. I wrote um some articles. I wrote one about Warren Buffett getting it all wrong. And man, I had never received hate like I received from that article. and uh and then just started my Bitcoin journey um for years over that. >> So you mentioned that it sounded like you kind of had some predis disposition to understanding Bitcoin. You mentioned you had an interest in Austrian economics. So were you already so this was in 2013 so about 5 years or so after the great financial crisis. Were you already disenfranchised at all with the legacy financial system? Were you concerned about the debt? Were you paying attention to the Federal Reserve and central banks and what they were doing within the markets or not so much and and trying to understand like where you were coming from at that time? >> Well, so when I was um when I finished graduate school, I went to work at the World Bank and it's very rare for like a white American man to be able to get a job there because they had the the very first diversity and inclusion requirements. It was very difficult to get in there. So, I got in there and I I was like, "Well, I'm going to go have lunch with anyone that will meet with me." And I started regularly having lunch with like the chief economist of the World Bank. And I remember sitting there being like, "Yeah, hey, why don't why don't we back dollars by gold? Like, does it doesn't it seem like our dollars are just getting worth less and less?" And even though he was this super high up, very nice guy, um, person, he could not explain to me why it was in my interest to have dollars not be backed by gold. He was like, "We can't do it any other way. We can't have the system." And I remember sitting there being like, "He doesn't actually know, or if he does know, he's definitely not willing to tell me." So when I left DC, I definitely had had this like what you think of as Washington DC, what you think of as these pristine organizations, the World Bank, the White House, Congress. I had come to the very clear conclusion that there were a lot of people that seemed like they know what were was going on and they didn't at all. And if they did know what was going on, they certainly weren't telling me. And so when I found Bitcoin, it was a perfect marriage between my being like, how does this thing work? And my understanding, which was I I I would admittedly vague understanding of Austrian economics. I actually think Bitcoin leads more people to Austrian economics than Austrian economics leads people to Bitcoin. >> Definitely, 100%. Um, I mean, that's how it was for me as well. Here's what keeps Bitcoiners awake. You're still securing millions of dollars the same way you secured thousands. that hardware wallet in your drawer. Your family's entire future depends on you not losing it, forgetting the PIN, or something happening to you. On-ramp's multi-institution custody removes that burden. Three independent institutions hold your keys. No single point of failure, no seed phrases to protect, no explaining complex recovery processes to your spouse. And now we're offering flat tier pricing. one predictable monthly fee starting at $250 whether Bitcoin is at 100K or 500K. Plus, with on-ramp IAS, you get the same institutional security with tax advantage growth. This is how smart investors protect generational wealth without the weight on their shoulders. There's strength in many. Learn more at onrampbitcoin.com. Okay. So you were speaking regularly with the chief economist uh at the World Bank which not many people can say that they were doing that and kind of had a moment of realization that well this is kind of wild. We can't get I cannot get a clear explanation as to why the financial system is the way it is. And were you at that point what what year was that actually Vance um those conversations? >> So that would have been 2012 and then I came to St. Louis and I made friends with Rob and then in 2013 I got really into it and then um and then I at the time I was running my own communications company and I had a client that said we want to get in the news and I was like well okay so what do you want to get in the news about? Well, we want it to be about tech and we want it to be you know letting people know that we're forwardleaning. And I was like all right well I've got an idea. how about for the whole of this contract, you just pay me in Bitcoin and then we tell people that you did it. And so in 2014, they paid me uh my one of my month's contracts in Bitcoin and boom, it exploded. They got more news press coverage than they could possibly have imagined. And uh and I had been paid in Bitcoin and then this like led me down the path of of speaking publicly in a regional way about Bitcoin. But one of the things and this happens to every single Bitcoiner. Your enthusiasm definitely outkicks your understanding of the fundamentals, right? There was a lot that I knew about Bitcoin, about how it was finite, but I didn't know anything about nodes. I didn't have any concept of what is a UTXO. You know, multi-IG was a completely foreign concept to me. And so I was definitely way out on the edge way before I understood or really knew just how powerful Bitcoin really was. Right. And there's still so many people who have no idea how powerful Bitcoin is. And to to think back over a decade in 2014, you were accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. That's that is really cool, man. Um and I could imagine that it gets a lot of attention, right? because I mean I didn't know anyone at that time who was using Bitcoin for any form of payment and let alone like most people don't even use Bitcoin as a payment today, right? And and so I'm curious like to tie that into kind of Bitcoin's story um right now and you anyone who's taken a look at Bitcoin, studied it deeply, looked at Austrian economics has kind of an idea of how things monetize, right? And so how does a money actually become a form of money? And so the popular theory is that it starts off as a collectible. It has to be scarce. There's other important properties as well. Of course, then you get to store value, medium of exchange, and then unit of account is kind of the full monetization, right? And so I'm curious uh in terms of how you think about Bitcoin today. Do you think that is your end state that Bitcoin becomes a unit of account and do you kind of think of Bitcoin predominantly as a store of value today? >> Absolutely. You know, there's a lot of discussion about the the like the minor details of is it a currency, is it a store of value, and really, it's whatever you want it to be and whatever your system is that you're using. So, for me, it is absolutely a store of value. It's a very secure store of value. It means that I don't have to uh be looking at the stock market and saying, "All right, which of these stocks is going to do well based on macroeconomic trends, right? I can just put money into Bitcoin and then know that over time it is going to go up. It has certainly replaced the savings account. In fact, I ask people a lot on my podcast every once in a while on Legacy Interviews like, "Do you counsel your kids to learn about getting a savings account?" And everybody's like, "Well, no." And it's because if you're putting money in a savings account, you're not getting an interest rate that's better than I mean it just being burned off to inflation. And so there is a lot about the way that you use Bitcoin is what it represents. Over the long term, I believe that it will demonetize many of the things in western culture. Uh you know, everything from apartments in New York, which you hear Sailor talking about, to an area that I care a lot about, which is things like farmland. a huge amount of farmland is purchased because it is a hedge uh against inflation and it is a way to park money outside of the stock market or buying jewelry or or having to have some other kind of asset and uh but I know how difficult it is to make money in land and I think increasingly we're going to see things like family wealth offices private equity they're going to realize hey that you know let's say on a really positive note that 6% return you're getting on farmland is nothing compared to Bitcoin. And the truth is it's not a 6% return on farmland. It's probably like 3%. And that's only if you include the government payments that are propping that farm system up. >> Right. So I I told you actually that I spent a handful of years in the farmland investment business and I was drawn to it because of many of the reasons that you spoke to. Right. It's a real asset. There's a finite amount of arable land in the United States and globally. It serves as an inflation hedge. It serves as a diversification play, very low or negative correlation to traditional assets. And so it spoke to me for a number of reasons and and we helped investors. It was predominantly retail investors, but they had to be accredited, right? So they're still on the higher net worth side, but they weren't um ultra high net worths or institutional by any means. But people were increasingly interested in farmland as a store of value. And so for you to say on this podcast, and I've heard you on some other shows as well, talk about how Bitcoin demonetizes farmland and other store value assets, I would be curious to hear what kind of reactions you get from the from farmers, from the agricultural industry. Because my initial my initial uh thought would be that concerns me, right? If I'm a farmer and you're going to tell me that over time my land may not appreciate at the rate that it has historically because people no longer view land as a as the premier store value asset and it's Bitcoin instead. That scares me, right? That does that impact my wealth? So, how do you have those conversations and kind of communicate the the challenges here as well as the opportunities? >> Well, so uh the farmers when I first brought this up, they hated it, right? So this was very strongly pushed against. And for your audience's kind of background, I have a podcast called the A Tribes Report, which is about the culture of agriculture. What's the news going on? So rather than me reporting on commodity prices, I'm talking about kind of the bigger picture of things. How are you reacting to new world screworm coming over? How do you feel about just different issues that are going on? And I each week on this show, I have what's called the Peter Teal paradox. This is where I ask my guest, "What's one thing you believe that nobody agrees with you on?" And uh and this always pushes people to say things that are a little bit heterodox and I was asked about mine. I said it and then I was invited by the farm credit system. So there is an entire banking system that is designed, you probably know a lot about this, but is designed to allow farmers to get loans to run their operation, to buy more property, to to do whatever they're going to do. They invited me to give a talk at the national level. And I ended up putting this forward. I put forward that I thought Bitcoin was going to demonetize land. And I had never received such a positive response as I had from that group. And I think there's something to do with farmers that has this like very strong tension and that is that uh we think of farmers as being really conservative but farmers know they have to find every single edge that they possibly can because they're all producing a commodity and a commodity is always going to go to the absolute base layer that it can. We're going to we're going to take out every scent of margin that we can. So there were a lot of people there that said, "I don't agree with this, but I need to understand it." And from there, I ended up ultimately being invited to join the Missouri Farm Credit board, the FCS financial as an outside board member. And they are by no means saying like, "Yes, we agree with Vance or we think," but they are very open to it and have brought me in to be a regular member of their board to be making sure that they're thinking long term. So farmers while they hate this idea because it is scary, they've also been radically more open to it than other industries that I've been involved in. >> Right. And and as I understand it as well, it's an industry that has I mean it's really hard work and the margins are very thin. Right. To your point, you're producing commodities. There's a lot of competition. Um on the inflation side, of course, labor is expensive. All the inputs have gotten so much more expensive as well. And so is your case then that hey, we actually have a better we have a better version of the future for you if you use Bitcoin as a savings asset alongside your farmland because it's actually going to allow you to preserve excess wealth and it's going to appreciate at a rate that's greater than the inputs on your farm and the labor. And so is that kind of the story that you tell or what are some of the other critical pieces that I'm probably missing? >> Well, so that's a good one. I think another one is um like hey imagine being able to put up collateral that isn't just your land. Um imagine as a young farmer you want to be able to store up enough value to be able to purchase land in the future but even more than that like you can make this case like 60% of the farmland that is farmed in the United States is rented farm ground. So that means somebody else owns that land and they are renting it out. Now, renting it out or farming it yourself, you have all those things. You have to actually go work the land. You have property taxes. You have local, state, and national regulations on top of you. And on top of that, whatever your rent is, you're in in constant competition. So, the the nominal value of land keeps going up because people are saying, "Hey, I I'm there's a finite amount of land. I'm going to go get into it." But when that return on that land is less than 6%, a lot of those um people that are land owners but not actually farming might want to move their money out, which means the people that are farming the land uh will have a much better opportunity to purchase land at a price that they can afford. Imagine if you were able to take out, let's say 50% of that 60% is no longer buying farm ground. Well, now you're going to start seeing prices come down. And for the land owner, this is terrible. But for the land accumulator, this is a wonderful thing. It gives you more opportunity. Um, but you know, I think there's just a lot of, nobody knows exactly how this will work out, but the current system is absolutely unsustainable. Right now, 13.5% of a farmer's bottom line comes from government payments. And so a lot of the reason that people are buying land is because they know they've got a a uh an annuity from the federal government that will give them money based on the fact that they own that land. And I think as things get tighter, as we enter the mandibles world more and more and more, people are going to push back against farmers getting that money and it doesn't matter they don't have the political support. I I don't think they will have the political support that they have now in the future. >> Speaking of mandibles, um and that was a great explanation. I appreciate you walking through that. The Mandibles book is funny because um Michael who's as I mentioned before we hit record a CEO and co-founder of On-Ramp is uh he's a big fan of the mandibles. maybe not you the story or picture that it paints cuz it's I know it's not the happiest story [laughter] >> but uh but uh in terms of maybe a road map in terms of how to think about the future could you kind of explain um maybe what the mandibles means to you or more more broadly less about the book how do you kind of think about where we are today just from like a macro perspective being a Bitcoiner what what concerns you where do you think we go from here >> yeah I mean the the best example that I can give the reason I love mandibles is because it made inflation become real to people. And now, right now, the status that we're in in the United States, people are like, I know what inflation is. My eggs are more expensive. My milk, my car insurance, my But when Rob and I were first going around talking locally, we would get invited to coffee shops and little local groups and we would talk about Bitcoin. We would have to say inflation is a problem. And people didn't think 2% inflation or 3% inflation, whatever the government was telling you. They were like, "It's no big deal. Well, my money's still good. So, we always had to use Venezuela as an example. We always had to use these like extreme situations to explain it because Americans just didn't really feel inflation. And now we're living in a world where you can you can see it everywhere you go. You can see it in the degradation of your washing machine that you bought. You can see it in the increase in your your car payments where you're not getting anything more, but you're paying more. And so mandibles to me was um a a bridge that allowed people to see much further into the future about well what happens if prices just keep rising? What happens if your house goes from being worth 800,000 to 60 million, right? That's a real problem if if you like for anyone that's trying to save anything. And I think that was the the wonderful thing about mandibles. And I actually am glad that Lionel Shrivever didn't like Bitcoin in that book cuz I think it didn't make it an ideological thing about Bitcoin. It just made people have to confront the realities of inflation. >> Do you find that most people in your circles have confronted the realities of inflation? Uh because you had mentioned when you first started talking about Bitcoin publicly and probably looked like a madman, right? because CPI is 2 3% in the in the mid2010s. And to your point, most people were kind of getting by. Okay. Um, you know, maybe not everything was so cheery. There's obviously a lot of concentration of wealth, which I think is a product of central banking and and governments meddling in the economy, but the inflation of 10 years ago is different than the inflation of today in the United States. And so I'm curious. Do you think that we're at a point now of inflation being a reality that people understand deeply? And if so, you know, why or why not? Most people haven't actually come to a conclusion of what's the solution, right? Like Bitcoin is obviously a lot of steps to get there, but even gold or just like thinking about why are we having inflation, I I don't personally see that many people think critically about it. And I don't I just don't know if the pain's not acute enough. Well, I think that uh the world is bifurcated um our own culture is bifurcated into tribes and right now the boomers, the the people that are asset owners, they they have their house, they are um continuing to make more money, more money than they've ever made before. Their bank account says you are rich. You are richer than your wildest dreams. Alternatively, on the flip side of that, uh, wage earners that are younger, that don't have, uh, assets are sitting there saying, "The hill that I'm trying to climb up gets steeper and steeper and steeper." So, the ones that are facing that uphill climb, they see inflation, but I think the pernitious thing, the really dangerous thing is it's inflation requires you to understand an abstract idea, really multiple abstract ideas. You have to understand where does money come from? How are prices set? You have to understand um you know how do uh how does savings and interest and compounding work? And so without that knowledge, you can look around and say prices are going up. Those people are getting rich. I'm not getting rich. I think the reason is X. I think the reason is illegal immigrants. I think the reason is money gouging pharmaceutical companies. I think it is whatever the thing that you come in with and very few people are going to arrive at inflation is because of central banking and the printing of money and the the M2 supply and how our banking system is set up. And so that's I think it's deeply important for Bitcoiners to be talking about where does inflation come from. But it's so much better than it was 5 years ago. There's so much more information. everything from, you know, the the hardcore Safodine to the, you know, more moderated Lyn Alden. You know, there are more explanations, but still there's only a few tribes that are getting the story that I think is the one that we would say is the most accurate. And there's a long way to go. And and I I believe that inflation is actually an incredibly dangerous thing because it gives politicians the opportunity to buy votes by telling people, I will absolve you of your debts. I will absolve you. Uh I will I will make these other people pay and I think we will get into a scapegoat economy that won't solve the problem but we'll continue to give the government more and more power. >> I agree with you. Yeah. I I this is one of the things that I struggle with personally um being a Bitcoiner and building a Bitcoin business is that most people are deceived one way or another, right, by the blue verse red team and just the mainstream media. I I actually when I first started writing more publicly about Bitcoin, I thought the best analogy to kind of what was happening was Plato's allegory of the cave. I'm not sure if you thought about this before in the context of Bitcoin, but you think about, you know, prisoners, right, in Plato's allegory, there's prisoners chained up and there's kind of jail guards behind them casting shadows on the wall. And I feel like the that's such a great analogy to the fact that you have one tribe of people who think that inflation is caused by the current administration. You have the um another side that thinks that inflation is caused by billionaires or greedy corporations. And these narratives just have so much money, right? There's so much fiat money behind these narratives and there's so much entrenchment in these narratives that there are very few people to use that analogy who actually kind of break free and exit the cave. Most people just kind of stay chained there and they they actually experience to your point things are getting worse. COVID inflation is way worse than it was 10 years ago, which is worse than it was 50 years ago. But most people can't actually understand what the heck is going on, right? Right. I mean, it's just like we're getting pitted up against each other. And so, that's why I think Bitcoin is socred incredibly important, but one of the challenging parts of it is actually getting to a point where enough people have adopted it. There's enough incentives for Bitcoin to succeed. And so, I don't think we're quite there yet, but I'm curious your thoughts. >> Well, the the fastest way for somebody to become curious about Bitcoin is for somebody to hold their hand and uh walk them to owning an actual Bitcoin. I mean, all the way from buying it on an exchange and getting it onto a wallet. I have a a good friend. He's a Canadian guy. He's in his like mid60s. And he pointed something out to me that I hadn't really thought of. He said, "Vance, all of the people that can learn how to do Bitcoin on YouTube, those have all been that that's all done. The rest of the people out there need to be walked through it. they because for whatever reason, their disposition, their um the way they approach problems, whatever that is, they're not going to do it on their own. And so now the the call for Bitcoiners that want to see larger adoption is to actually take somebody by the hand and walk them towards Bitcoin. If you have employees, it's um paying them a bonus in Bitcoin. If you are uh working with somebody that's doing housework for you, maybe it's like, "Hey, for Christmas, instead of just uh giving you cookies, I'm going to give you this wallet and I'm going to actually spend time with you to show you how to use it." Um, and what you find is, you know, maybe only 20% of the people that you walk to that place are going to stay in that place, but 20% is a lot better than 0%. >> Yeah, it's a step in the right direction, that's for sure. Here's the conversation no one wants to have. 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One thing I didn't get to pick your brain on yet, Vance, uh, but ties into what we're just talking about now was when did you actually view Bitcoin as a savings technology for yourself and for your family? Um, because you had mentioned 2013 you came across it, 2014 you took Bitcoin as a payment. Was it almost immediate or did it build time and conviction for you to actually get to a point now where it sounds like you have some sort of material allocation as a percentage of your net worth in Bitcoin? Yeah, I would say from the very beginning once I knew that this was hard money, I I was I was on board. Um, and of course, like just like in every phase, every single phase of Bitcoin, the feeling is, man, it's expensive, right? I can remember when $800 was a really expensive Bitcoin. And then watching it crash down and then having, you know, your spouse be like, "What? What? What are we doing here? This isn't going to work. Everybody I talk to says that this isn't going to work. And so there's some amount of like being a going through enough cycles that when the cycles are going up or down, you're less impacted by it. And it's only then does it really turn into that savings vehicle where you're like, I don't know price, what is the price? It goes up, it goes down. It's going to be it's going to go up over time. But like for me once I really understood it um I was I was all in. I will say this, one of the most important experiences maybe of my adult life was setting up a node. Setting up a node was like peering over the edge of the universe or something when I I didn't really understand Bitcoin until I plugged in my Raspberry Pi and started downloading the blockchain and it took me 5 days to get it. And that's when you're like, whoa, this is truly staggering. And then when you start realizing what you can do once you have a node and how it all works, that that solidified that took me from being like a ideological to being a technical owner. And the technical owner is superior. >> Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, for so many people, right, like running a node is maybe not a point that they get to, but to your point, they may get to a point of self-custody, right? And I I I think even sending your first Bitcoin transaction is incredibly powerful to the extent you're sending money across the internet. You're not relying on any intermediary, no one's permission, and it settles instantly. I mean, that is such a technological feat that I think um most people have yet to experience. Well, I know most people have yet to experience, but I know when they do experience it and they actually spend the time to understand it, that's the critical part. Then it becomes really magical. And um one thing also that you mentioned was the cycles. I I don't I don't know if we if you want to spend time on it, but obviously 2025 has been kind of a a disconnect between expectations at the start of this year and reality where we're recording on the 5th 15th of December and the year's almost over. If I take a step back in January, everyone was incredibly excited. 2024 was a great year for the price of Bitcoin, right? That's obviously not the most important thing, but it's typically a good indicator of sentiment. Are more people adopting it? Are more people excited about the future prospects of Bitcoin? Are they not? So 2024, you had the ETFs that were launched, a lot of access that opened up for people in their brokerage accounts and, you know, grandparents could buy Bitcoin and they wouldn't have to set up uh their own hardware wallet anymore. And then you come into 2025, you had the Trump administration won the presidential election. Trump and his cabinet head campaigned on being very pro- Bitcoin and you know making the United States the crypto capital of the world and so I think expectations were incredibly high in 2025 starting the year but as we kind of look at where we where we landed today I feel like it wasn't necessarily a bad year but it was just a different year like Bitcoin didn't have a crazy blowoff top like it has typically it also hasn't really corrected into like a very significant bear fair market yet. So, having been in the Bitcoin space for over a decade, I'm curious what you chock that up to. >> I I mean, I am just as as guilty as everybody. You know, you see one of these videos where somebody's like, "Bitcoin's going to do this crazy thing and that's just this nice warm blanket that you put around yourself." But the truth is like I once you get to a certain point not of of watching the market go up and down, you realize the people out there talking so much about what's the price going to do where you know what's going on. I I would say almost no one gets it right and it doesn't really matter cuz whatever your prediction is like reality is what matters. And so like I actually have come and this is because I my whole crew of people all the people I spend time with are all Bitcoiners. Um or if not they're willing to debate and have good fights about Bitcoin. I love the pain. The pain is awesome. Right? When when you purchased at 120 and it goes down to 86 you're like the only way you can hold on is if you really understand this. And so for me, watching people lose their minds, you know, capitulate, go out of the market, like I love it. I more and more pain. We could have more pain for several years. And it's great because only the people that really understand it will stay in the game. And that's fine because [laughter] it means you get cheap Bitcoin. >> Fans is cheering for a bare market next year. Bring it on. I mean, I like to see the price go up for sure, but it's the the I I really hope people take the time to go back and look at people's predictions on where that was at. And then, you know, just tack it up on that person that you watch all the time that said it was going to 200,000, you know, like just remember they knew just as much about the market as as somebody that thought it was going to be bearish, you know. >> I couldn't agree more. I I experienced this um I personally started paying more attention to Bitcoin in 2020 and started allocating more meaningfully then. And so 2021 I had owned a little bit of Bitcoin back in 2017, but like 2021 was really the first cycle that I was excited about and understood and paid very close attention, had a lot of skin in the game. And I saw it back then and I saw it this year where there's so many participate participants in this industry and commentators who throw out all these ridiculous price targets and they have all these form fitting charts to uh support their thesis and they're all wrong. And so I know it's not what gets the clicks. It's not what gets the views, but people I mean generally speaking most people don't know what's going what's going to happen with Bitcoin. Like this is a new technology. were watching it monetized from nothing 15 16 years ago to $100,000 earlier this year and I mean I think it's going far higher than that and it sounds like you do too if your idea is that it demonetizes other asset classes and people move to Bitcoin and we have a Bitcoin standard potentially but nobody knows the time frame of what what that happens and nobody knows what the price is next year and nobody knows what like the main catalysts are. We're trying to figure that out but I mean it's it's kind of a a mood point in many ways. >> Yeah. I mean the the Omega candle that people talk about, right? That those kinds of candles are really fun, but we don't actually I don't actually want society to make a radical very very fast shift to Bitcoin. That will equal incredible instability in instability that means broken supply chains, uh global war, all kinds of things. So, for me, a steady march up is is much much better than, hey, I just watched Bitcoin jump up by, you know, $100,000 a coin. Because really, what that will be measuring is not that Bitcoin's value has gone up by $100,000, but that the value of the dollars has plummeted so much that people are trying to jump out of it or or whatever other currency. So for me, a nice steady climb up with lots of downturns where people, you know, get shaken out. This is a far superior way to make it so we don't get to Bitcoin due to instability. We get there in a stable way, >> right? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So is your is your um kind of ideal way this plays out then there's a more and more education in the space allows more people to understand what's happening with Bitcoin, dip the toes in, get allocated, start viewing Bitcoin as a savings technology. Um and is it your preference then that this happens over a longer period of time so that there's more of like a peaceful transition into a new monetary system? Is that kind of how I understand it? Yeah, I mean I'll take whatever is going to happen, but I think that um when you're raising a family, right, all of a sudden getting there really fast, but recognizing that the the chaos that would happen from getting there very fast, that's what I want to avoid. I do not want chaos. Chaos is uh is one of those things. It's easy to dream about like, oh, I'll I'll I'll be really successful in this scenario, but when chaos happens, a lot of things break and a lot of um unintended consequences happen. I do think over the long term, we move to a Bitcoin standard. I would love our government to be on a Bitcoin standard. I think some of the worst things that happen um in our world is that the government has the ability to do anything they want, wage any war that they want, support any cause that they want, and getting on a Bitcoin standard would have some potential to tamp that down and make them think about, are you spending real treasure, but getting rid of credit markets very quickly would be catastrophic. And so, let's just make a nice steady plaude upwards. >> Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And from a government standpoint then um you know that's a funny one because many people in this space think that kind of have an idea of Bitcoin from its early days right it's going to be a money for peer-to-peer transacting and we want the government to stay out of it. We don't want Wall Street to participate in it. This is our um you know this is our money for us to use as individuals. But the reality is if Bitcoin does monetize to the degree that we kind of have talked about during this episode, it's going to require that governments get involved. Um, and they're going to have to compete for hash rate, which may be happening already. They're going to have to compete for Bitcoin treasuries, which is happening at a very, very small margin, really, not meaningfully yet. And the same thing with Wall Street, right? I mean, I personally think the ETFs are a great thing. Do I use them personally? Very, very little. I mean, I own mostly Bitcoin in in my um in on-ramp and in self-custody, and most people aren't going to get there yet, though. And so, like, I'm curious, how do you think about just adoption broader, broadly speaking, from governments and Wall Street and just kind of like these different institutions getting involved? Well, I think uh the thing to watch will be commodity markets because I think that um one of the things that's overlooked in the way that our entire economy works is how much you have to change currencies in order to be able to purchase commodities. The commodities, whether they're energy or they're corn and soy, you know, grain. Um you have this this kind of dual-sided thing where you are uh in in US terms, right? People have to go out and buy dollars in order that they can buy oil and then those dollars are really for having future purchasing power for other US western goods. But it also the government can do things to be able to push their currency up or down to make those goods cheaper over time. Countries that don't have to do that aren't going to do that and they are going to find it is a lot better if our entire commodity system is priced in Bitcoin. So that way we're not also factoring in the difference between currency levels. At first, whatever government who does that now is going to be at a really serious disadvantage, but over time the government that has been prepared and understands this and has prepared their citizenry and their and their markets for this, then they're going to get a big win. So I I think we will probably in the next few years start watching more and more commodities get priced in Bitcoin and then from there we'll start seeing well not only do they get priced in Bitcoin they get sold in Bitcoin and I think that commodities will be what will spread Bitcoin adoption more than ETFs more than many of these other uh ways to get Bitcoin without actually physically owning it. >> Yeah. No, that that's an interesting point. And I mean it ties into the agriculture background that you have and then also ties into kind of what we've seen in the margins um from a sovereign level. It's been less about Bitcoin, but it's more so been pricing um assets in in gold and and right there's this coalition of countries for a while now that have been trying to derisk themselves from US treasuries and move more into gold for a number of reasons. It's um it's apolitical, cannot be seized, can't be debased, etc. And so I I think a natural conclusion as well is that for a number of reasons it would make sense for countries to do the same with Bitcoin. >> Yeah. And I think they are I think that the governments are going to try and keep it as quiet as they can for as long as they can. Um because once once accumulation becomes a sprint, that's when things get very unstable. So I think there are a lot of going to be a lot of movements. You know, we've seen little things bubble up about China um and Russia doing deals for oil and Bitcoin. We'll see how much this continues. I think it will likely be between countries uh that have very unstable currencies. Think about within Africa, throughout Asia, South America. I think they're going to find a benefit of uh pricing and then ultimately buying in Bitcoin. And so they're going to have a good reason to go out and get it and get their citizenry involved in it as well. Definitely. I have one other question just uh on this topic before we kind of round out here and get to a close. Do you have any thoughts fans on um on stable coins as it relates to US dollar hegemony and the topics we were just discussing? And um and Bitcoin's role in that as well. And I'll tell you kind of where I'm coming from so you have the context. But like we'd spoke about countries moving into gold past decade or plus. Um I think the US has such a strategic advantage from a Bitcoin standpoint. There's so much Bitcoin held in the US. There's so many Bitcoin businesses built here um and crypto more broadly as well. And there's certainly an opportunity for the United States to lead um from a position of power as it relates to Bitcoin and and I feel like stable coins is kind of sits very neatly alongside that. Do you have any opinions just like um in terms of how maybe your thinkings evolved? I don't know if you ever were like, "Oh, the dollar is going to collapse like a decade ago like, oh, the dollar's collapsing, you know, inflation, etc." A lot of people are like that, but it seems like the dollar is going to be have an extended shelf life because of stable coins, because of Bitcoin. >> To me, stable coins are a way of dealing with the very real problem of liquidity, right? We are trying to find a way to bring as much liquidity into the United States markets. So that way we can build assets, we can build factories or roads or whatever for as cheap as we can. And frankly, when I heard Putin's explanation of what was going on with stable coins, I was like, "Yeah, that's that is what they're doing. They are using stable coins to parachute into other countries that they know um those countries currencies aren't any good. So, they're going to give them access to stable coins so they can get, you know, offload their own currency and we're going to suck all that value back to the United States." I think there's going to be some uh governments out there that are going to take this as an existential threat and I think that it has the possibility to lead us into very serious conflict even with people that have historically been our allies. I know the uh the Danes just this week um just Monday today um put out a a listing saying the US is using financial um mechanisms that are harming us and this may lead us to having conflict and not with them but with their with the US allies. And I think like stable coins are going to be a trick that they're trying to use for a short amount of time and then and then countries are going to reject them for the for the kind of sneaky trick that they are. >> Huh. Interesting. So maybe they don't extend the dollar shelf life. >> I think it could really piss a lot of countries off. I think like I think like and and ultimately if you can go out to a market and you can get a stable coin, you can get a Bitcoin and it's going to be a lot you're going to get price appreciation on a Bitcoin in a way that you won't with a stable coin. You know, maybe you don't lose as much, but you you won't have anywhere near as much opportunity to gain. >> Definitely. So, to round it out here, we're almost uh at the end of the year, got 2026 ahead of us. I know you mentioned that you're okay with the pain. You get to stack more sats, ride the wave. Um but I'm curious if you have any thoughts into 2026, like historically speaking, that would next year would be a bad year, right? If we repeat historical patterns. I'm curious if you have any thoughts or you know what you read, what you listen to. What kind of expectations do you have for 2026 as it relates to Bitcoin? Is it going to be a bullish year? Is it going to be bearish? Do you think like anything interesting will happen as it relates to adoption? Any thoughts there? I I mean I think we're the one that's kind of the obvious is that hash rate is going to continue to grind on and on and on. And I think that energy markets are going to uh increasingly play a role in um uh in how people are thinking about Bitcoin. To me, I I think we're going to watch the price of electricity go up a lot because the demand is so high. And then I wonder at what point that starts forcing the hash rate to slow down cuz right now it is on a rocket ship up. And when I look at that and I think well what happens if energy prices continue to to to go up really dramatically here in the US will that slow it down or will people say no this is the best use of energy? I don't know. But I think that's that's the thing I'm probably the most interested in is the the price to mining hash rate kind of combination right there. >> Fascinating. Yeah. I mean hash rates been exploding for years now and so there's a lot of speculation as to what's driving that and maybe kind of what you alluded to a little bit was could be potentially countries participating very quietly. Um but yeah, I think that'll be interesting to watch and fence really appreciate the time. It's been a pleasure getting to know you a bit better today and uh you know hear your thoughts, perspectives. I think they're unique for this space and so um thank you for coming on the show and where would you like to send anyone who wants to get in touch with you or you know wants to learn more about what you're working on with Legacy Interviews? >> Sure. you. I have uh two websites you can always visit, vancecrow.com where I talk about becoming a better communicator and then uh there's legacys.com where you can um get access to help. I will record your family telling their life stories so future generations can know where they came from. >> I love it. I really think that's such a fantastic idea. I I really mean that. >> Well, thanks man. This has been a really fun conversation. >> Awesome. Thank you, Vance. >> Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onra Media is forformational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. 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