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Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have Mr. Nashville, Bitcoin Park, Rod Rudy. During the show, Rod and I talk about how he participated in a local Bitcoin meet-up in his hometown and took things to the next level by creating an entire park that has attracted numerous developers and Bitcoin builders to the city. We talk about some of the more profound events he's had at the park, like for instance holding a lightning summit among many other events, how he's teamed up with Kathy Wood's arc for sharing important information about Bitcoin to all of her investors and much, much more. So without further delay, here's my interview with Mr. Rod Rudy. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by The Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hi, TAP listener. This is Stick. I am hosting a networking event for the listeners of The Investors Podcast in August, Denmark, October 7th and I hope you'll join me. The event is completely free and we'll have tapas and wine for everyone. The intention is to keep the event small and we only have 15 spots open. It's invitation only and to apply, just need to send me an email at stake at Theinvestors Podcast.com with your LinkedIn profile and the title of the last book you've read. Please also include just a few lines about why you like the book. You can find more information about the event on deinvestorspodcast.com, less Denmark, that is deinvestorspodcast.com, less Denmark. There's no set agenda for the meeting and we have no speakers. As is often the case with a free TAP events, we discussed investing, wonderful books we read and everything else in between. I hope to see you soon. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Rod. Rod, we've been friends for quite a while now. We talk all the time. I don't know why it's taking this long for us to do a podcast recording together, a bit welcome to the show. Preston, the pleasure is all mine and I haven't really had much to talk about yet. So I'm really excited. That's not true. That's not true. You have a lot to talk about. For people who are not familiar with Rod, he is Mr. Nashville. He is Mr. Tennessee. He is the guy that any time you see Bitcoin park in Nashville, he's the guy and Maddo Dell, those two are the guys that are really kind of making this happen. So I'm curious because when I was in Nashville, I went over and I toured the Bitcoin magazine location and I was talking to some of these guys and they were showing me like all the stuff that there's something that you don't think about with Bitcoin magazine is they have to store like the volcano and like all this so like it's showing me the warehouse there in Nashville. Anyway, so we're walking down the street and they point to this like look like a warehouse and they said, this is where the Nashville meetup used to take place in Rod was the guy running it. And I didn't realize this. I didn't know that you were kind of doing this before Bitcoin park. So tell us kind of your Bitcoin story. Tell us about the early days of these Nashville meetups and how it's evolved into this monster, this thing that you created there. Go ahead. Well, appreciate that. Definitely cannot take full credit. Actually, the meetup originally started when Mills moved to Nashville and she was like, hey, let's do a Bitcoin meetup and we did. How many people are you talking right now? You know, for the first one was August, I want to say 2021 and we had 20 or so. So folks come and it was awesome. It was so magical. It was a bit rainy. I'll never forget it. It was outside Jackalow brewery. We were just on park benches going around just introducing ourselves. We had folks that found out about the meetup and we're visiting from like Philadelphia. They were at like some business convention. They popped over. We had older folks. We had younger folks and I'm like, wow, this is pretty gnarly that we just posted this and people just decided to take their time. They're most valuable precious resource and come here and hang with us and jam on Bitcoin. Then we moved to a more topic focused meetup, which was kind of like in between of a social meetup and a bit devs where I think it was October and I purposely did this because I knew the Bitcoin magazine guys were doing a quarterly off site. I knew a lot of people were going to be in town and I actually there was another like freedom festival. Anyways, the Stefan Lavera was in town and then Matt O'Dell was in town and I was like, hey guys, why don't you guys join me for a panel and let's talk about Bitcoin. I'm like, yeah, sure. We jammed on it and then we had like maybe a hundred people show up for that. So we went to 100, which was kind of impressive. Then next thing, you know, this thing snowballed and every month since we've been having a different topic focused Bitcoin topic each month and I think it's been pretty special. I'll say that. Yeah. Shout out. So talk to us about the leap. I mean, this is like, so we're talking about a hundred people, you're on park benches and like doing this kind of just ad hoc to, I mean, really going all out and really kind of talk about the facility, Rod, because for people, maybe I'll tell you a couple stories that'll lead up to this. Please do. Please do. So Jacqueline Breury, shout out to Steve, the owner and their entire team. They were so kind. This was during COVID, you know, looking for a dedicated space such that we can host people. And this is out of our own, you know, out of pocket expenses. And this is a pro tip for any meetup organizers out there. Get your costs to zero because then it'll be a burden on yourself. So Steve was kind enough to give us a dedicated space and Jacqualo on Wednesday nights. And I was like, Hey, what's your least traffic night? And he's like, Oh, Wednesday nights. I'm like, done. We'll do Wednesday nights and we'll do the second Wednesday of every month. In our own space, they actually had a projector and so on. They had AV equipment and they gave us a bartender. No minimum, no anything. I just said, Hey, we'll bring people there. And next thing, you know, people start showing up buying beers and we drove revenue to the establishment. But more importantly, people started traveling to Nashville for these meetups, which was really cool to see. And we kind of outgrew the space. We outgrew the space in a number of people and also what we wanted to do there. We wanted to bake it as free and open as possible one time. I think in December, mining was the topic and it was December, I want to say 2021, Harry Sudeauk, Kevin Zang, I mean, he kind of calmest diverter, Colin Harper, let's go on Max Geigley already, Marty Ben, Matt, all these people came in town and it was like a mini mining summit. We had 250 plus people hanging off the stairwell and so on. I'm like, dang, we probably need a larger space. And also, we need a space to do what we want to do. And fast forward to, well, June, I want to say of 2022 or May and June of 2022 and we took the crazy leap, which I do not recommend unless you're crazy and got our own dedicated space, which is now Bitcoin park. Tell people about the space, this is unreal. Yeah, the space, the story behind the space. So there was a band, a country band and they were breaking up, well, actually, let me back up for a second. My background, I was in tech for a number of years and did angel investing and then did some real estate, both residential as well as commercial. I like to simplify my life and identify like really top level people in each of these different disciplines, whether it's legal accounting and real estate, commercial and residential and just work with them and they know exactly what I like and I know how they operate. One of my friends now is my commercial broker and I was like, hey, here's a unicorn idea and property that over the next few years, I would love to look at one, it needs to have its own bar, two, it needs its own co-working space, three, it needs its own event space so I can host these meetups, four, it needs areas or rooms to record podcasts and so on. And this is one of my good friends and he never sells me on anything, but he's like, Rod, I literally may have something for you and it's like off market, these guys are breaking up and they want to do something like very under the radar. And the next thing you know in the heart of Hillsboro Village, which is walking distance to Vanderbilt and Belmont University, we have Bitcoin Park, which is these, and you know, and I really appreciate you pressing, I mean, you've been up so many times in supporting us and just participating, which is awesome, so I'm speaking of the choir, but they're two dedicated buildings and they're beautiful, they're really well designed, classical, the furniture, everything stayed with the place, which is also kind of amazing as well. I actually don't even like talking about it because I don't do it justice until you experience it yourself. To include the Starbucks level coffee machine that was required that you take it upon receipt of the building, correct? Correct, and there's a funny story with that. So we take over the place in June or May, June, and I forget what the price of Bitcoin was, but it was definitely higher than it was today, and we can drop down to whatever it was, 15K. And somebody told me that that espresso machine would fetch anywhere from 10 to 20,000. I was literally this close to be like, get it out of here. We're selling that, we're taking a Bitcoin, but there's so many members that each morning were making their own espresso and really appreciated the quality of the machine. And I couldn't pull the trigger and sell it even though. Boy, that's going to be a painful less than 10 years from now. It will, but I will say this, which is probably a not unpopular opinion. There's going to be a lot of painful. Oh, I spent, you know, 3,000 sats on buying stickers at the lightning bed machine, too, a number of these other things. I think using Bitcoin over time and finding joy will be better than any of those like, oh, I wish I just held it, if you will. So maybe it's like a joy versus want no doubt, no doubt. Here's the point that I want the listener to really kind of take away from this conversation, not just us kind of oozing over the Nashville location. This is really about education. This is really about how can you, in a cellular kind of way, in your local community that maybe you love just like Rod loves the Nashville area, take away this conversation to help educate your local domain where you love to be. And the do's and don'ts, the importance of such a mission, how you can find fellow Bitcoiners, things like that. So like when you look at that broader mission of what we're trying to accomplish and educate people on, what are some of your top kind of takeaways from what you've learned doing this in style in Nashville, Tennessee. So it's, I'll say the TLDR, then I'll go into a lot of detail. TLDR, it's, it's very easy to do, very hard to be consistent and even harder to make it unique and excellent. And we're still learning on those last two areas a lot and tinkering a number of different things. It's easy to do in the sense that the tooling and the audience and the community support is there. You just got to do it. And don't over engineer it. Don't think like the end product is a Bitcoin park or a Bitcoin commons or a pub key or a redding Bitcoin center or any of these other third spaces. It could be just you and your friend sitting at a bar with less noise around you bothering you and just enjoying a beer and talking about Bitcoin and the latest developments in the Bitcoin space, whether it's on the economics incentive side, on the technical side, whatever your specific passion around Bitcoin, follow that and then create a meetup page. Still we need to like use meetup. It's kind of like YouTube and so on. They just have the distribution then go from there and then you know tag me and we have a telegram channel with almost 200 Bitcoin meetup organizers and supporters. I'll say the hidden sauce, especially for Mills, Matt and now Harry who's joined us is there's a small group of just dedicated big corners that just want to help in your community. We have an unbelievable one in Nashville. I can just go down the list of folks that have just been there to help set up the AV to help take out the trash to help clean up after folks, although I will say Nashville is a little different. Everyone cleans up after themselves, which is just awesome and just starting and you'll be surprised by the number of people that come out of the woodworks like a Preston Pish that you'll meet in the courtyard and have a beer with until 11 o'clock at night and be like, wait, you're that guy on that investor's podcast, right? What are you doing here in Nashville, Tennessee? Rod, so as you look at your mission and what you guys are really trying to accomplish there, walk people through just so they can kind of get a feel of how you've laid it out and what you're trying to like maybe short term and then long term objectives with the park. So simply Bitcoin Park is a community supported campus here in Nashville, Tennessee and we're focused on grassroots Bitcoin adoption and a home for Bitcoiners to work, learn, collaborate and build. I think I have a somewhat unpopular take and I'm nuance in the wording of this, which is hyperbiquinization versus grassroots Bitcoin adoption where yes, hyperbiquinization is great and it could happen, but I think I'm a big compounding interest guy and compounding of my time and reputation and capital. I think with grassroots or grassroots Bitcoin initiatives in your local community, that's the best thing you can do in terms of fostering education amongst your local community because yes, number go up and Bitcoin, all the economic properties, but you also want to support your local community and educate them because that's where you're raising your family, that's where you're putting your roots and hopefully looking out 10, 20, 30 years and my wife looks at me like perplexed a lot of times, but one time in particular, I was like looking at one of our kids and I was just staring at her and I was like, I can't wait to give your toast at your wedding. She's like, she's three years old, what are you talking about? That gives you the sense of my low time preference of how I'm thinking about these things. So similar in that vein with Bitcoin Park, we do a number of things that are just completely different. We max have about 250 people that can attend because of the limited space. We have a no social media, no photos policy, we're in this day and age and no knock, it just differentiates ourselves so that we can have more intimate conversations and deeper conversations, which I think are in more importantly in real life, which are lacking in general. So long story short, I think you can start within your community in a number of different ways. So I was up, this was probably, I don't know, six months ago with my family and we were just kind of sightseeing around Nashville and one of the big sites to go see is this Parthenon and yes, I said Parthenon for people that aren't intimately familiar with Nashville. So back in 1897, there was like this fair that was happening in the Nashville area and there was this major call his name was Eugene Lewis, who really kind of doubled down on this idea that Nashville was branding itself as the Athens of the South. And so this major was like, we need to literally build full scale Parthenon in Nashville. And so they did, they built this thing, you know, over a hundred years ago. And I was reading, when I was up there visiting, we visited it as a family, I was reading about this major who brought it there and this idea that Nashville was, they were branding it as the Athens of the South. And later that weekend, I was over at Bitcoin Park and I'm talking to Rod. And he says this phrase, him and Matt are standing there and you guys go, yeah, we want a brand Nashville as sovereign valley instead of like Silicon Valley. And it was just too coincidental for me as I was literally touring this Parthenon the day before and then branding Athens of the South. And then you and Matt are standing there saying, yeah, Nashville is going to be sovereign valley. And so for people that aren't intimately familiar with what you're doing there, you are truly making this happen with this brand. And where I see it most rod is you're actively involved in the political environment in Tennessee in Nashville. I mean, I've gone over there and I've seen literally senators, US federal senators walking around the park. And I've heard from the governor's office that they're involved in that they're going over to meetups. And you're just acting on this idea of Nashville being sovereign valley. There's a question where I'm going with this a lot of Bitcoiners. They don't even like the idea of interacting with politicians. They're like, well, Bitcoin's going to be successful no matter what. And I think you see it differently. I know I see it differently than that opinion. And I won't say my reason why, but I'm going to ask you why? Why do you engage in the politics when you and I both know Bitcoin doesn't need the politicians? It's going to be successful in the long run one way or the other, but why? Why would you engage in politics like that? So you said the word active. I wouldn't say I just slight reframe. I would not say I'm active, but more reactive. And now I am, yes, correct, engaging a little bit, even clicking up a little bit. I think we've been fortunate to welcome all sorts of people to the park. And that makes it super special. Going back to that meetup back in August of 2021, we had, yeah, like grandparents, even after that grandparents, high school students, one high school student. And now he's at Vanderbilt. It would take two buses when his parents were out of town just to come to the meetup. And he'd bring his math books in front row. And he just, I was like, I'm investing in you. By the way, stay close to me. And I won't dox him, but I'm definitely going to be investing in that kid. We had a number of different types of people. There was no make and model of a Bitcoiner, especially in Nashville, Tennessee. There's no sub mining, I mean, although now mining is very prevalent here, don't get me wrong. But there's no, oh, there's, it's tech focused. It's this focus. We're just Bitcoin focused here in Nashville. Yeah. And at first, I'll be honest, you know, when a number of these teams would come and engage us or try to engage us, I just, I didn't know what to talk to them about. So I just politely decline. And a very, very fortunate and a huge shout out to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Grant David and Stephen, who work out at Bitcoin Park. At first, I mentioned a couple of these meetings. And I'm like, please take these meetings. Let's jam with these folks. So I just bring them along. And then they've been great to follow up and engage with these folks. I guess my long story here is it's not proactive. It's more reactive in the sense that what's the end game? The end game is to drive even greater local Bitcoin adoption and then hopefully influence some policy makers who carry a lot of weight, fortunately or unfortunately, around educating them on Bitcoin and the values around freedom censorship resistant and permissionless freedom money. And I think we've done an okay job. I think there's still a lot of room to go. But I will say rather than on the legislation side, one of the areas I'm really interested in is driving Bitcoin entrepreneurship. Here in Tennessee, in general, as well as specifically in Nashville, 1031 doubling down in Nashville, other Bitcoin investors doubling down here in Nashville, other Bitcoin entrepreneurs moving from where they are to Nashville, Tennessee. That's just going to compound and attract even more talent, more developer talent. We're doing even more things like in the open source community, big shout out to Steve Myers. We have Matthew Ramston, who just recently quit his job and got a grant from spiral working out of the park. I mean, Preston, like I have goosebumps talking about this kind of stuff because it's like an honor and a privilege to host these folks and be a vessel for them to build and create collaborate and learn here in Nashville and the best is yet to come. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. The traditional 6040 retirement portfolio is failing giving recent events. So why leave your retirement stuck in the past? Even adding just a dash of Bitcoin as part of your retirement portfolio could dramatically change the long-term performance, but only if you can keep the Bitcoin secure for years. Our friends at Unchained have designed the simplest and most secure Bitcoin IRA that puts you in control of the keys, but with Unchained available as a guide to set things up or assist if you hit any roadblocks. With a transparent onboarding fee and fixed annual fee, you don't have to worry about spending more and more as your traditional or Roth Bitcoin IRA grows in value. You can easily roll over old 401ks or IRAs into your new Unchained IRA to convert it to Bitcoin directly from their trading desk. 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You don't want to leave that area. Correct. You want to make sure that the people around you that are in your vicinity get it right. And that's why you're involved in that way. And the only way to actually involve yourself is through education. You don't care if it's Republican, Democrat or whoever. You just want to make sure that they actually understand what the hell they're talking about when they talk about Bitcoin. And all these ancillary altcoins that are a disaster and that they actually understand what they are, right? Like that's why you're involved. It's because you don't want it to go to some other jurisdiction or domain. You want it to be in your domain where you want to live. And 100% right? Like that's it. And so I guess I get a little frustrated with folks. And I think what it does is it actually speaks more to maybe their dissatisfaction with where they actually live than anything else. Yeah, 100%. And I'll say this one of these well known politicians said to me, I want to be on the right side of history here. So I want to do the work to learn about this. And I was like, you and me, both my friends, you and me both. I'm putting my time capital and reputation all in on this Bitcoin, the capital B, the monetary network and Bitcoin, the lowercase B, the reserve asset. I think Bitcoin, the capital B monetary network is going to serve as the money protocol for 8 billion people across the globe. I think Bitcoin, the lowercase B in one sentence, it preserves my future purchasing power better than any other investible asset ever created in a story. So with those two as I'll say constants or knowns, how do we go and build from there? Well, it's we're around recruiting developers, recruiting entrepreneurs, recruiting users, recruiting all these people. And then what's the common denominator amongst all that? It's education, you know, and education is in my opinion is by doing. And so here at the park, you know, we accept Bitcoin. So it's one of the coolest things when, you know, some of these folks that are whatever, back in 2013 or even 2017, when they're like, can you buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin? Well, when you come to Bitcoin park, I'll buy the cup of coffee for you with Bitcoin. And they see their eyes light up. And then I'll like point over to the lightning-vending machine. And I'm like, hey, would you like to buy a sticker? And I'm like, zap, you know, oh, not zap, but he's lightning and buy a sticker. And I'm like, what where am I? And I'm like, Disneyland for Bitcoin. It is better than that. So when I was up there, you have this video game that's set up. What's the name of the one that's like the snake where it's like going after it's like, oh, that's a cool game. So there's this game chain tool, like four arcade style there at the park. And I was there. I was playing with Max. And so Max is like, Preston, you want to play this? I was like, yeah, how do I play? We basically put, I don't know what it was, like a thousand sats on deposit, 10,000 sats on deposit on each of our sides of the, she was player one, I was player two. We both load the thousand sats into the game. We play the game. I won. And at the end, there's a QR code that pops up. Yeah. And it's like claim your sats, which, you know, if we, I don't remember what we loaded into it, but let's just say it was a thousand each. There was like 1,900 sats that I could collect after the game was over. So I just pull out my Bitcoin wallet. I scanned the game and I got 1900 sats on my phone. The other hundred sats, some of them went to Bitcoin park and some of them went to the developer of the dang game. I like awesome as that. It's unreal. And it was a blast. Like we're competitively playing against each other. You get paid, the developer gets paid and the winner of the game gets paid. And I'm just like looking at this, I'm like, there's something big happening here. Like this is just wild for people to be able to experience some of these things you have on display there. Just it's wild. Yeah, even another one. So we hosted the Lightning Summit here in July and thanks again for coming up and we wanted to bring Lightning to life and a huge shout out to George Vicaro. He created from scratch a Bitcoin park kiosk arcade. You just play arcade games that you pay via lightning. You can toggle different screens within that arcade game. It's now a fix to our wall with beautiful Bitcoin park branding. I need to take another photo and just post it on Twitter. But in Noster, it shows Bitcoin stats like mempool and the Clark Moody's dashboard and the time chain calendar. And it's now like a really fun member benefit that they can use it as an entertainment center. There's videos, there's memes. It's got like a nice track ball with a joystick. Human ingenuity is just so amazing in that Bitcoin space. The people that are creating this kind of stuff like the lightning sticker vending machine I mentioned before, you know, massive shout out to Tommy and Joe. They're the creators of this with Sam from lightning store. You just did I go and say, hey, can you do this for me? Like selfishly, they, you know, they brought that idea to us. And we're like, of course, we'd love to be the vessel or the platform for you guys to demo your beautiful games or your beautiful creations and try it out with the community. And I think that's where this third space, which one is Bitcoin park could go eventually is within those local communities. It's like your own like many demo days and many workshop areas where, hey, I'm tinkering on this idea. I want to go and see if I can find my first customer or find my first couple of users. Yeah, we have now our meetup pages over, I want to say 13 or 1400 people and post a little workshop, you know, XYZ. And then we get anywhere from 10, 15 to 100 people to show up. And it's like, whoa, this is amazing. I've got a question for you on Noster. So I've been up to the park a couple times. And, you know, you are hyper focused on Bitcoin, right? And then there's this Noster, like social media, decentralized social media thing that Bitcoiners are also, I'm going to use the term obsessed with. And it keeps coming up at Bitcoin park, but it's not Bitcoin. It's this other thing. It's this like free speech platform. And it seems like everybody at the park doesn't mind getting away from Bitcoin to talk about this Noster thing, this decentralized social media communication layer. Why do you think that is that Bitcoiners are so willing to give up their time focusing on building and talking about layer two or whatever they are on Bitcoin to talk about this communication layer. So I think the underlying or the Kibbutz in the word comment denominator is around freedom tech. And I think we're going to see more freedom tech movements. Bitcoin is the money protocol for freedom tech, in my opinion. And then there's going to be a social protocols around the freedom tech stack and of which I think Noster's fantastic. Jack Dorsey was on Jack Muller's podcast, the Money Matters podcast, and eloquently laid this out in terms of the stack from money to social and then to messaging with simplex. I need to do a little bit more on simplex as well. And I think taking the principles of what makes Bitcoin great and applying it to all these other areas that have been captured, you know, your audience already knows like how the internet structure with TCP, IP and HTTP and SMTP and FTP. But those protocols are super lean. And the application layer has taken over and monopolize and become super centralized. So it's this is again, go back to the low time preference to go back to doing my daughter's speech at her wedding. This is a super, super long game and put on comfortable shoes, everybody, because it's going to be a long freaking game. As we are redoing and unwinding a lot, not even unwinding, just going to another stack of amazing technology, it's just going to take time. It's not going to work perfectly, but I think it's going to be working better. And that's where to answer your question directly, that's why I think a lot of folks, especially in the Bitcoin community are super enthusiastic around these other freedom tech oriented platforms. It almost seems like a coordination layer. Like you got Bitcoin, which is this ultimate exchange of energy. So like if you perform work for me and I need to pay you for that work that you performed, we want to use Bitcoin because it's the most secure, immutable ledger of this energy exchange that has taken place between the two of us. But in order to coordinate that, where I put the request to you through a communications channel in a way that can't be destroyed or screwed with or controlled by some outside entity, we need some type of layer that's not happening on that money layer, but that's happening out on a coordination layer. I don't know if that's the way that you would define it. And maybe that's why Bitcoiners are so, they can see that harmonious relationship between the need to coordinate and the need to exchange energy. And they kind of like go together like peanut butter and jelly. Is that how you view it? Totally. Wherever there's a middleman, a Bitcoiner is ready to go and blow it up. And honestly, that's not providing a ton of value in the brokerage side. And so one of which is on the Facebook to Twitter's the Instagrams of the world. Again, this is going to be a take a long time. I'm not saying it's happening tomorrow, but I will say with Noster adoption, are you getting folks like the jacks of the world, the presence of the world, the Odels of the world, and so on behind this and where they're investing their time and energy and making this their primary platform. I think it's got a faster adoption curve, if you will. And then the best marketing is around when people get canceled censored or booted off any of these platforms. Then they realize that even though they still need to use the platform, it's they're building their business and their potentially livelihood on quicksand. Someone going back to the money side, I think like I haven't read up on this, but PayPal introducing their stablecoin. And now they can just freeze or delete the dollar stablecoin in their balance. People are going to get a root awakening in terms of when they cannot use their money. And it's just a painful lesson. But I guess Preston, a lot of folks just need to touch the stove, including myself to learn and really drive personal responsibility and personal adoption. And I think it's just so fascinating. Like I'm a big class half full topic person. And selfishly, by the way, I'll finish this thought and I want to tell you about why Bitcoin Park is also the most selfish thing I've ever done. But it's surrounding myself by all of these builders that are building so much amazing tech like the mutiny guys are a great example that progressive web app that they're building around. You can just take 12 words, pop it in and you have your whole lightning wallet full stack ready to go. No one's going to mess with you. And you got to go take that wherever you want to go in the world. And how cool is that? And we're just at the beginning. I remember when we're doing the dang lightning torch pass with Jack and all these other folks. And you know, you had to go into the command line to, you know, basically send a lightning payment. Now we're bitching and moaning from wallet of Satoshi being two centralized versus like a moon now being two centralized to now mutiny being the next best thing. How awesome is that? That we're having those type of debates. Yeah. So I'll leave it there. And then maybe I come back to the most selfish thing. I know whenever I come up and visit, I just I kind of look at all the panels that you guys are having and the people that are coming into town to speak at the park. And I'd look at you and Matt and I'm saying, these guys are just hearing such deep conversations around the engineering and the tech that I think most are not getting access to. I know it's way deeper than the stuff that I cover on my show personally. What is something that you have seen in maybe the last six months that you just kind of went home at night and you're like, wow, I just saw I saw the neatest thing in the world today at the park to your wife. Yeah. So that is a good segue because the Bitcoin park is literally the most selfish thing I've ever done before in like 20 years. I was traveling around to meetups conferences just to go hang with Bitcoiners. When Matt was in New York, I would fly to New York to do cold card workshops with him and learn like about how to use cold card. Then go to BitDevs and it was a lot easier when I had zero kids, but flash forward to Jay with like, you know, four kids all very young. I'm glued to my house. That changes. That changes things. It does. And by the way, this was like, you know, 2017, 2018 when I got into Bitcoin. So kids have been fast and it has been awesome. So not some Bitcoin OG or anything like that. I then was like, okay, this is another constant, which is probably limited, not probably it is definitely limited travel. What can I do to because I love meeting people. I love hanging with you, Preston. I love sitting out in the patio and just jamming on life, Bitcoin and everything like, how do we do this? So we did the meetups and it's like, all right, we'll do a monthly cadence and we'll invite our friends to come and talk on a panel and we did and people flying driving and so on and coming into town. So that's why it's the most selfish thing I've ever done is because it's about them coming to us here in Nashville rather than us going to them. I'll never forget that around some of the panels and some of the things that has blown me away. A slight reframe on that and I'll answer it directly, but the people that I've been able to meet that I otherwise would either not have met or maybe have met at like a at a conference or just passing through for like a quick drink where I can have deep meaningful conversations whether it's just, you know, a number of plebs to even you and I getting a much deeper relationship. I mean, with this six or seven times where we get to see each other per year, which is just awesome. To a number of other big corners, but I'll say so we started with the meetup. We expanded to the bit devs now monthly bit devs, which is the Tuesday before our monthly meetup, which is Steve Myers and Matthew Ramsey and Pee host that bit devs and they do an amazing job. But then we're also doing these workshops one in particular, Craig Raw from the founder and lead developer of the Sparrow Wallet. Man, you want to talk about big brains Preston? That guy is a big brain and he just did up basically a 15 20 minute demo and then stumped the big corner and took, you know, another 40 minutes to an hour of questions and it was just awesome. Another one whiz has always been great. He goes comes through the park multiple times a year and we'll always do a mempool.space and our own channel assist demo and I'll send a transaction and he'll follow the transaction along, which is always always fun. Other ones like NVK doing a 10 Vivek doing a tap signer demo to the community. Like bringing the Bitcoin to life and showing it with the founders, I think goes such a long way where then after they're done, somebody can come shake their hand by the product from directly or just ask a follow up question and then I will make one more point and then I'll stop rambling, which is I think the other thing about what makes the park unique but also other meetups as another just pro tip is around allowing open questions to be asked and not recording those questions so that are meetups. I mean, another good one was back in June of 2022 when we our topic was investing and building in Bitcoin and we had a panel with you Marty Grant Gilliam from 1031 and Larry Laparte and you guys went just deep and wide and the questions that were coming from that packed room again filled to the brim were freaking awesome and I love that about the intimate conversations we can have amongst each other around Bitcoin. Otherwise, you would not have on Twitter when you're doing your keyboard commando or on a space when you're doing you know your telephone tough guy type stuff. So you got an issue next year next summer Bitcoin magazine is coming to Nashville and I think I think you're going to have a lot of people that want to come over and see the park but there's only so much space. How on the world are you going to handle this? We are working on it and workshopping it which I'll give the honest answer which is I really hope everyone comes and visits us 11 months out of the year you know art we have a free and open meetup that you go to meetup.com or bitcoinpark.com for slash meetup and just join and you can stay at the date we have the free bit devs we have free workshops and so on for the Bitcoin conference they're probably going to have 20,000 people plus more baby attend that conference which is so amazing and it's going to be down in downtown Nashville an awesome venue with all the bars and so on downtown. We're not that far away from the I mean it's about two mile walk we're probably max capacity 200 to 250 people max max and we're tracking to have 200 members present on our date you're one of the members and we're going to make it like a member benefit and member focused time at the park and it's not excluding anyone it's just we have limitations around size and by the way it's me Matt Harry and Josh that's Bitcoin park so we don't have a team or anything like that so we need to do a couple updates we'll you know we've been toying around a temporary fence which we need to do for a number of reasons but maybe even building a beautiful wall as well but long story long I would just highly recommend taking a visit here's another pro tip go and this is what I always tell my Bitcoin friends to come to Nashville and and jam with us at the meetup like let's just say nobody shows up to the meetup and it's a terrible topic and I suck which all high probability go and find a band that you like and they always undoubtedly you know come through Nashville and then go and see them or go and be like you know what I'm going to go downtown to the honky-tonks for the first time and enjoy that or I'm going to go to this amazing restaurant or experience Nashville let's take a quick break here from today sponsors you want to speak a new language but haven't quite got the hang of it meet your language learning match babble you get a whole kit of effective learning methods that have been developed by real teachers in over 200 language experts your taught useful everyday phrases for every day conversation and you can test your pronunciation too beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice babble is designed for you to break down that barrier that makes you feel self conscious and for your knowledge to become hardwired in that way you feel comfortable and confident speaking 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they're really are they're really are so don't come during the conference come some other time for one of the meetups so definitely go to the conference because the conference is going to be awesome but definitely come for one of our other meetups for sure and i will say even the week before that we're gonna have the by the way i don't think we've announced it yet but we're gonna have the lightning summit the thursday friday before the conference so that's gonna be 200 folks ticketed folks and we're gonna run that the lightning summit back that was one of my favorite summits by the way yeah yeah yeah and then yeah it's gonna be i mean i hope over time we can i don't even know what the right word is but to your point around noster and freedom tech and a number of these things it's like ingrained in the the Tennessee culture i'll say that's why i think i've gravitated and assimilated myself so well to the community here sovereign valley man sovereign valley and i think by doing we're gonna accelerate that more and more i think it just takes time you know being a small business owner now i have a newfound appreciation for other small business entrepreneurs around payroll utility is taxes licensing all the bs that nobody really talks about that takes up too much mind share and then you sprinkle in and say oh and by the way you should accept bitcoin like dude i'm barely trying to survive here and you're telling me i got to adopt this like new technology but i will say i think there's paths to drive further bitcoin adoption here in our local community and over the next number of years i'm really bullish on that one of which hopefully is an excellent is the conference last thing i want people to know is you have teamed up with kathy wood and arc creating some media what is it like once a month and i participated in this last conversation that you that you released and just really bring it on some brilliant thinkers and it's really neat that like how did you link up with kathy and like put this together first thanks for joining that that was awesome what would you take it was awesome it was it was just tell me your perspective no it was it was just a it was an awesome group we had mollors obi and some others and it was just an awesome group to kind of jive on where we kind of think some of this is going and maybe why on the one of the things i remember is like the immediate settlement side like why isn't that moving faster like what are some of the incentives that are driving that and it was just a great chat in general and and really a lot of fun bit yeah big shout out to kathy and you just seen they've been believing in the bitcoin park mission for quite some time so the idea which was proposed to us was around all these great monthly topics that we're bringing and having in person conversations around how do we leverage arcs production team and distribution and then combine it with us creating and curating the content and if that you know that worked out where we are able to create a different topic each month so it's called the monthly bitcoin brainstorm we just released episode number one we did have yeah Preston was on jack mollors was on kathy was on you see now mandra was on we had ob we had harry su dock on and it was just an amazing discussion around a few different topics and so a few different sub topics the overarching topic was building and scaling and then each month go forward we're going to do this hopefully the last week of every month we're targeting and whether we're going to curate a different conversation so we have some ideas around bitcoin and the economics and incentives of bitcoin we have AI and bitcoin and yeah i'm just super bullish on arc and the bitcoin park podcast and i'm cautiously optimistic on this partnership and i think this audience that they have which is slightly overlaps with the bitcoin park audience which is around high net worth individuals family offices private equity institutional investors as well as just bitcoin curious folks were able to create that content and the cool thing is them giving us the controls around making this bitcoin focused they have their other crypto and other investment vehicles around their disruptive technology mission but we're going to stay bitcoin focused and uh produce it every month awesome all right rod well we talked about quite a few different things air we'll have links in the show notes to the items that you mentioned and if people do want to come visit the park hopefully between now in the conference we'll have a link there where they can kind of go to the meetup portion and reach out any other highlights that you have or links that you want to highlight for people to to follow you or the park no i mean we'll just put them in the show notes but i just want to say thank you so much i think this is my second podcast i've done i just it's an seriously an honor and a privilege present you've been doing this for so long and just to be a guest on your platform is truly an honor thank you sir who's wonderful having you and it's been a lot of fun up there up in sovereign valley so that's right all right thank you for making time and coming on the show room absolutely if you guys enjoyed this conversation be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use just search for we study billionaires the bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and i'd love to have you as a regular listener if you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found a valuable if you can leave a review we would really appreciate that and it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm so anything you can do to help out with a review we would just greatly appreciate and with that thanks for listening and i'll catch you again next week before we end this podcast i want to tell you about a new position at the investors podcast network we're looking for a new host for a show millennial 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BTC143: Local Bitcoin Education & Meet-ups w/ Rod Roudi (Bitcoin Podcast)