Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset.

We are spending like drunken sailors.

Bitcoin is the only economic entity where.

The.

Supply is unaffected by the demand.

If you want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert that currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable.

All right.

Welcome back to Scarce Assets.

This week I'm joined by Vance Crow, who is the founder of Legacy Interviews.

Vance, thank you for making the time.

It's nice to meet you and appreciate the flexibility with some of the technical difficulties we just had.

Anybody that's doing a podcast knows what what technical difficulties can do to your show.

Yeah, You know, I really appreciate it.

I've been looking forward to this conversation.

Right before we were 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 you mentioned living in a small town in Illinois and having the agriculture background.

Can we talk about that first before getting into some of the details around Bitcoin?

Sure.

Yeah.

So I grew up in small town 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 small town Illinois.

And I went on to college.

I studied communication and then I became a deckhand on a ship.

And that started me on a bunch of adventures.

Just, 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 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 Seton Hall School of Diplomacy and then went to work at the World Bank.

I was in DC for a couple of years, realized that wasn't for me.

And my wife and I moved to Saint Louis and I was offered a job with Monsanto, the very, you know, kind of dark and ominous place that people have heard of.

And I worked there for five years before 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 in the stories of their lives.

That's fascinating.

So I would say an unconventional career path that you've taken.

I'd be curious if you take us back to graduating college and, and becoming a deckhand, how did you make that decision?

Why didn't you pursue, you know, let's say a more conventional route?

Well, I 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, 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 they said, what do you what do you really care about?

What do you want to be spending your time doing?

And he said, all I want to do is travel and meet people from other cultures.

That's all I care about.

And he said, OK, 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 traveled up and down the Western Hemisphere.

It was a small ecotourism 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.

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 and not doing the 9:00 to 5:00, 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 for whatever reason, maybe Bitcoin ties into this conversation in a similar fashion to the degree that you don't actually pursue it sounds like the conventional path, at least from a career standpoint.

Yeah, I would say that I am.

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've 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.

When it comes to holding Bitcoin securely, Peace of Mind starts with architecture.

On Ramps, Multi Institution Custody distributes control across three independent regulated key holders and a two of three quorum.

No single point of failure, no pooled or omnibus exposure.

Segregated client titled faults.

You retain full legal ownership while on Ramp coordinates security, compliance and operational workflows behind the scenes.

It's strength of money delivered through the simplicity of 1.

Multi Institution Custody is the foundation for everything.

We build sound infrastructure that distributes counterparty risk and provides fault tolerant resilience with clear audits and institutional controls.

And now on ramp is piloting flat predictable pricing, making best in class Bitcoin custody and financial services more accessible now than ever on ramp strengthen many simplicity in one to learn more, check out on rampbitcoin.com.

Definitely.

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 with your, what you're doing with legacy interviews, because you'd also mentioned at some point during your discerning of what you want to do that you want 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 five years before I started legacy interviews, I was the 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 AG 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 audiences, college classrooms.

I would get invited to different like skeptics in the pub events all over the United States, Canada and Europe.

But when Bear bought Monsanto, 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 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, what 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 only a six year old could answer.

Like what do you think your dad does all day at work?

And 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 couple months later, his dad called me up and said, you know, Vance, I was at a party the other night.

We were playing a game and a question came up.

If you could only 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 6 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 and I said, hey, if anybody wants me to interview your parents or your grandparents or somebody for the holidays, let me know.

And I 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, we built it out.

We have a studio, I have a team that does a great job of editing.

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 the 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 a podcast and having that, that asset that can just live forever, right?

As long as it's digitally protected, of course, but the family that 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'm 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, 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 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 5 different areas.

Their ancestry, their childhood, career, marriage and parenting, and then the wisdom that they've learned along the way.

And in this 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 what rules were really important to your parents when you were growing up?

Or am I asked about when you got a little bit of money put together, what did you spend it on?

Because this all the 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, there 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, That 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 Vance Crowe, 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, and legacy interviews off air here to try to get the ship back on a, you know, ship back on track here.

So I don't know how much contacts 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 it to, you know, all the standard Bitcoin podcast in the past six months.

And so I think a lot of people are 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 belong your individual journey.

So 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.

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 will struggle to get along with them.

And my buddy's name was Rob Long.

And 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.

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 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 the 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 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 and then just started my Bitcoin journey for years over that.

So you mentioned that it sound like you kind of had some predisposition to understanding Bitcoin.

You mentioned you had an interest in Austrian economics.

So were you already?

So this is in 2013, so about five 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 I'm trying to understand like where you were coming from at that time.

Well, so when I was 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's 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, what 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 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, DCI 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 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%.

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 for getting the PIN or something happening to you on ramps.

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.

Other Bitcoin is at 100K or 500K plus with on right buyer raise, you get the same institutional security with tax advantage growth.

This is how smart investors protect generational wealth without the weight on their shoulders, their strength in many.

Learn more at on rampbitcoin.com.

OK, so you were speaking regularly with the chief economist 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 it again, 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 I actually dance those conversations?

So that would have been 2012.

And then I came to Saint Louis and I made friends with Rob.

And then in 2013 I got really into it.

And then, 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, OK, 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 forward leaning.

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 my one of my months contracts in Bitcoin and boom, it exploded.

They got more news press coverage than they could possibly have imagined and 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 you every single Bitcoiner, your enthusiasm definitely out kicks your understanding of the fundamentals, right.

There was a lot that I knew about Bitcoin about how is finite, but I didn't know anything about nodes.

I didn't have any concept of what is a UTXO, you know, multi sig 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're accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment.

That's that is really cool, man.

And I can 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 so I'm curious like to tie that into a kind of Bitcoin story right now, anyone who's taking 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 the 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 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?

Yeah, 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 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 is certainly replaced the savings account.

In fact, I ask people a lot on my podcast every once in awhile in 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 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.

You know, everything from apartments in New York, which you hear Saylor 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 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, 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 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 talked about how Bitcoin D monetizes farmland and other store of 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 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 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 AG 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 Screw Worm 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 Thiel Paradox.

This is where I ask my guest, what's one thing you believe that nobody agrees with you on?

And 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 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 we're gonna, we're gonna take out every cent 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 'cause it is scary, they've also been radically more open to it than other industries that I've been involved in.

Right.

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 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 like, hey, imagine being able to put up collateral that isn't just your land.

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 a 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 regulation 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'm 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 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 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 landowner, this is terrible.

But for the land accumulator, this is a wonderful thing.

It gives you more opportunity.

But that, you know, that 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 1/2 percent 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, 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, and that was a great explanation.

I appreciate you walking through that.

The mandibles book is funny because Michael who's, as I mentioned before, we hit record as CEO and Co founder of on ramp is he's a big fan of the mandibles.

Maybe not the story or picture that it paints because it's I know it's not.

The.

But but in terms of maybe a road map, in terms of how to think about the future, could you kind of explain 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 Bitcoin or 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.

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, 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 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, I'm glad that Lionel Shriver didn't like Bitcoin in that book because 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 because you had mentioned when you first started talking about Bitcoin publicly and probably looked like a madman, right?

Because CPI is two 3% in the in the mid twenty 10's.

And to your point, most people we're kind of getting by OK.

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 are just like thinking about why are we having inflation.

I, I don't personally see that many people think critically about it.

Not.

I just don't know if the pain's not acute enough.

Well, I think that the world is bifurcated.

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 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, wage earners that are younger, that don't have 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 pernicious 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, you know, how do 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 XI 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 are 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 five years ago.

There's so much more information, everything from, you know, the, the hardcore Safedeen to the, you know, more moderated Lynn 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.

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 will 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 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 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 your 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 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 another side 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 experienced, to your point, things are getting worse.

COVID inflation is way worse than it was 10 years ago, which is what?

Worse than it was 50 years ago?

But most people can actually understand what the heck is going on, right?

I mean, it's just like we're getting pitted up against each other.

And so that's why I think Bitcoin is so incredible, 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 walk them to owning an actual Bitcoin.

I mean, all the way from buying it on an exchange and getting it on to a wallet.

I have a, a good friend, he's a Canadian guy, he's in his like mid 60s 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 because for whatever reason, their disposition, their, 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 paying them a bonus in Bitcoin.

If you are working with somebody that's doing housework for you, maybe it's like, hey, for Christmas, instead of just 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.

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.

If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin?

Really think about it.

The seed freeze hidden in your house, the hardware wallet and the safe.

That complex multi 6 setup.

You understand it, but does your spouse do your children?

Billions in Bitcoin are already lost forever because people did not plan for this moment.

Onramps inheritance solution is built into our multi institution custody from day 1/3 institutions, clear beneficiary designation and professional succession planning.

No technical knowledge required from your heirs.

And with our new flat tier pricing starting at $250 monthly, your family won't face surprise custody costs just because Bitcoin.

Appreciate it.

The same predictable fee whether Bitcoin hits 200K or 2 million.

Don't leave your family's future to chance.

There's strength in many Visit on rampbitcoin.com/inheritance that is on rampbitcoin.com/inheritance.

One thing I didn't get to pick your brain on yet, Vance, 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?

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.

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 talked to says 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, 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 at 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 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 note 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 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 one thing also that you mentioned was the cycles.

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 or more people adopting it or 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 their own hardware wallet anymore.

And then you come into 2025, you have the Trump administration won the presidential election.

Trump and his cabinet had 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 a different year.

Like Bitcoin didn't have a crazy blow off top like it has typically.

It also did hasn't really corrected into like a very significant bear market yet.

So having been in the Bitcoin space for over a decade, I'm curious what you chopped it up to.

I mean, I am just as as guilty as everybody.

You know, you see one of these videos where somebody's like bitcoins going to do this crazy thing.

And that's just this nice warm blanket that you put around yourself.

But the truth is, like, 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 would say almost no one gets it right.

And it doesn't really matter because 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.

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 1:20 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 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 it means that you get cheap Bitcoin.

That's a cheer for a bear market next year.

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.

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 and 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 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.

We're watching it monetize from nothing 1516 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 moot point in many ways.

Yeah, I mean the the Omega candle that people talk about, right?

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, 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 bitcoins 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 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.

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 when you're raising a family, right, all of the 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, is one of those things that'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 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 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 plot upwards.

Yeah.

No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

And from a government standpoint then 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 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, 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 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 in a very, very small margin, Really not meaningful 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 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 the thing to watch will be commodity markets because I think that 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, you have this this kind of dual sided thing where you are 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 would 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 ways to get Bitcoin without actually physically owning it.

Yeah.

Now that that's an interesting point.

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 from a sovereign level.

It's been less about Bitcoin, but it's more so been pricing assets in, in gold and, and right, there's this coalition of countries for a while now that have been trying to de risk themselves from U.S.

Treasuries and move more into gold for a number of reasons.

It's, it's a political cannot be seized, can't be debased, etcetera.

And so I, I think a natural conclusion as well is that for a number of reasons that 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 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 and Russia doing deals for oil and Bitcoin.

We'll see how much this continues.

I think it will likely be between countries that have very unstable currencies.

Think about within Africa, throughout Asia, South America.

I think they're going to find a benefit of 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 on this topic before we kind of round out here and get to a close.

Do you have any thoughts fans on, on stable coins as it relates to U.S.

dollar hegemony and the topics we were just discussing and and Bitcoins 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 spoke about countries moving into gold past decade or plus, I think the US has such a strategic advantage from a Bitcoin standpoint.

There's so much Bitcoin held in the US or so many Bitcoin businesses built here and crypto more broadly as well.

And there's certainly an opportunity for the United States to lead from a position of power as relates to Bitcoin.

And I feel like stable coins is kind of sits very neatly alongside that.

Do you have any opinions just like in terms of how maybe your thinking's 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 is collapsing, you know, inflation, etcetera.

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 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 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 that the Deans just this week, just Monday today put out a, a listing saying the US is using financial 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.

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 at the end of the year, get 2026 ahead of us.

I know you mentioned that you're OK with the pain.

You get the stack, more sats, ride the wave.

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 increasingly play a role in, in how people are thinking about Bitcoin to mean 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, because 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.

But yeah, I think that'll be interesting to watch.

And Pants, really appreciate the time.

It's been a pleasure getting to know you a bit better today and, you know, hear your thoughts, perspectives.

I think they're unique for this space.

And so 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 two websites you can always visit vancecrow.com where I talk about becoming a better communicator and then there's legacyinterviews.com where you can 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 Onramp Media is for informational 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.

Visit onrampbitcoin.com Contact to.

Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.