Jay Dyer (11:04)
One of my biggest mistakes. And yeah, I also was a little too conspiratorial back in those days. And so you have really been paying attention because, yeah, I remember I would, I would listen to Max Kaiser's RT show and I was, you know, broke college student at the time. I think I was doing grad school in like 2011, 12. And I would listen to him talking about all this stuff and I remember him mentioning bitcoin. And then I went, I spoke at a conference and some dude was like, hey, dude, I will give you two bitcoin right now. If you get a wallet, I'll send it to you right now. That bitcoin was like, I don't know, $50 at the time or a hundred dollars. And I was like, what are you talking about, a wallet? Right? So just, it never. I didn't click with me. I didn't get it. And everybody has this phase, right, where you're like, you don't, you. You're against it, you don't get it. And then it clicks, right? And it wasn't actually Max's shows that that made it click. It was because I had a friend that I was arguing with and he was trying to get me into bitcoin around the same time because he liked Max Kaiser and Alex Jones too. And Alex would have Max on and Max would mention bitcoin back then and I was too conspiratorial. I thought anything tech related just has to de facto be kind of in the domain of, oh, the technocrats are going to control it. They're going to control us through that. And so my assumption was as I see people today, like, the assumption is this is centralized money that has backdoors, right? We saw this with the Epstein stuff, which was preposterous, right? People saying Epstein put back doors into bitcoin. Total nonsense. There's no backdoors in a public ledger. It's decentralized. So it doesn't make any sense if there was backdoors, right? You have a public system of, you know, people who would have noticed this already in. Throughout the whole bitcoin network, presumably. So, yeah, I think it was. What was the big catalyst? I think actually the catalyst was my. My buddy kept putting pressure on me, and then I was like, all right, well, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna disprove. I'm gonna go and I'm gonna disprove bitcoin, right? So this is what. Everybody does this too, where they go and they're like, I'm gonna find all the dirt, and I'm gonna show my buddy that you are duped. You're such a dummy, dude. I can't believe you're falling for this, obviously, scam. And so I remember reading a bunch of articles, and I remember at the time, even Mike Adams was anti bitcoin, and he had a bunch of podcasts against it. And so I wrote this big essay against bitcoin and money and all the. That form of money. And eventually I was like, all of my predictions and thoughts about it because I kind of bought into, oh, bitcoin's going to die next. You know, it'll be. It'll be a zero next year. It's a passing fat. Well, then I noticed, like, 2017, that summer, it was like, it went up to, like, 1800. There was like a bump sometime around early summer, and it went up to, like, 20. It. It went to 1800, then maybe like 2, 200 somewhere in there. And I was like, well, this is not really fitting with what I said last year, that this was going to go to zero, right? So I thought, well, you know what? I'll. I'll try this out. And I. Initially, I was like, I'll try it out as, like, a bet, you know? So I remember having to argue with my stupid ass. The bank was like, you can't buy that. I'm like, yes, you can. I had to go back and forth with these boomers that you can buy bitcoin. It's not illegal. And so I eventually started stacking bitcoin. And that was when it went that. That year, I think the peak was 19,000 20,000 before it, you know, crashed again. And then I. Everybody was like, oh, you should have sold it at 19,000, 20,000, you idiot. You could have got out. Because that was back when everybody thought, you know, oh, it's a thing you trade now, right? And you get in, you get out again. I still didn't understand the philosophy and the long term vision. I was just looking at it like people think about stock trading and being a crypto trader. So I was still uneducated, but I was beginning to learn more. And then I think I had that phase where everybody does, where you do trading, you try to trade crypto. And yeah, I want to make money on all these trades. And I did that for several years. And then I realized that at a certain point it was like, if I had just stacked bitcoin, I would have actually been a little better off than had I been spending all of this ridiculous time trying to time the trades and trying to follow the market cycle and, and all this stuff. So everybody kind of goes through that cycle too. And then I moved back into being more of a. You know what? I really think that the purpose of this was to fix the monetary system and, you know, whatever all that other stuff is in terms of, like, it's more like gambling. If you, if you're going to do mean coins and if, you know, all that other stuff, tokenization, that's another thing. And people, people want to gamble, they can gamble, but that's not what bitcoin is. It's fixing the monetary system. And that's the key point here. And that's what kind of brought me back after making the same dumb mistakes that everybody else makes, where you think, oh, I'm going to trade cryptos and make a bunch of money. And then I remember one, one trade. I remember I lost one night because I was an idiot. I didn't know what I was. I didn't really know what I was doing. I think I lost like $40,000 in one night on trades. And yeah, so that was back in 2018. But that taught me a big lesson. Like, okay, maybe I need to know what I'm doing before I start playing with all this money. And, and again after, if you get burned a couple times, I didn't ever get burned again that bad. Maybe, maybe 10,000 or something like that later on. But after you get burned a few times, you realize I should just stack the bit. Like, there's no better, like, proposition than just stacking the bitcoin. Like, it just, it's, it's like Playing the lottery with more money than you want to play the lottery with.