The Past And Future Of Bitcoin With Natalie Brunell

 

You may have heard the term “Bitcoin”, but what is it exactly, and how is it changing the world as we know it? Join Halle Eavelyn, and her guest, Natalie Brunell, the podcast host of Coin Stories, as they discuss the past, present, and future of cryptocurrency. As two leading voices in Bitcoin and economics, Halle and Natalie will break down the definition and the mechanics behind Bitcoin as it relates to the real world – including the importance of women investing in order to secure their financial futures. If you want to find out why you should be investing in Bitcoin, this episode is for you.

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The Past And Future Of Bitcoin With Natalie Brunell

I am unbelievably excited because my guest is the host of her own show, Coin Stories, the incredible Natalie Brunell. I can’t tell you why I ran into her on crypto Twitter but I did early on. She has been somebody that I have seen as a shining light for people explaining Bitcoin and also being nice in the space.

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Natalie, thank you so much for coming to the show.

Thank you so much for having me and for the kind words. I’m excited about our talk.

I love to start with this question. What caused you to get into this space that you are in? What caused you to get excited about Bitcoin?

It’s an interesting story. I was predisposed to appreciating Bitcoin long before it was even ever invented or released into the world. I’m a first-generation immigrant, and my parents worked hard. They came here when I was young from Eastern Europe. My parents grew up under communism. I always heard stories from them about how difficult it was to get basic necessities. They would have to wait in lines. There was no sense of economic opportunity or social mobility. It was you did what your parents did, and money was not that easy to come by. No one was able to take care of or plan for future generations.

Everyone looked to America as the place for the American dream, economic opportunity, freedom, and self-determination. My mom dreamed of coming to the US at a young age. She wasn’t able to make that happen until her late 30s. My dad was in his early 40s. They came and started from scratch. They started over and didn’t know the language. I admire them so much for their strength, courage, and sacrifice. I watched them work hard.

When you start over in a new country, you have to start from the bottom. I saw them working multiple jobs into the weekends, trying to make it for their family and kids. They worked hard. They were good at savings. They finally were able to purchase their first house in about 2004 or ‘05. I spent my high school years living in that home. The financial crisis hit while I was in college, and they lost everything. As they finally achieved the American dream, the home with the two kids, and the vacation once a year, they lost everything.

That was hard for me to witness. It planted a seed and a fire in me. First of all, I was so confused like, “How did this happen?” My parents were good people. They played by the rules. They worked hard. How did they lose the house that we are in? It also made me angry and frustrated. I’m seeing these big corporations on Wall Street getting bailed out but my parents are losing their house like, “How is that fair? How is this American?”

I entered into a career in media. I pursued journalism and felt something was wrong in the system but I didn’t know what. I spent the next several years documenting what I felt was almost a demise of the American dream, a decline of the American dream, and a feeling that the country was becoming more and more polarized. People felt they were left behind. Everything was getting more expensive. Wages weren’t keeping up. People started pointing fingers as we probably would do. “This person is the problem. This team is the problem.”

When I started to learn about Bitcoin years ago, I started to connect the dots that many of the problems that exist within our society and that I had been reporting on and documenting as a journalist are because our financial system is so broken. It socializes the losses and puts them on the backs of the working class and the middle class. It privatizes the gains and makes the rich ever more rich. We have this growing wealth concentration.

So many of the problems that exist within our society are because our financial system is so broken. Click To Tweet

There’s a potential solution through technology, which I found so much hope in. Before Bitcoin, I started to look at the future like, “How is this going to get better? Every year it seems to get worse. People get angrier. It’s more expensive.” Now I look at the future with a lot of hope. Bitcoin will usher in the ability to rebuild our financial system in a way that’s more inclusive and fair. That’s what inspires me. That’s why I decided to start my podcast and start educating people about Bitcoin.

Your background is what brings you into that world because you didn’t take the American dream for granted like so many others did, have, and continue to do. We’ve gone through a black swan event, which is this horrible crashing of all the markets all the time. It has been fun for everyone to watch. Bitcoin is at its low. It looks like it’s probably going to go down further, and yet, here you are, and here I am saying, “We should all do this. Let’s all jump into the pool together.” Talk about that a little bit, maybe why you are not afraid and also why others shouldn’t be.

It’s important to understand that we talk about Bitcoin as an asset almost in the same way people talk about maybe stocks. Bitcoin is a powerful technology network, and it’s in its baby stages. It’s in the process of monetizing but it’s a computer network. It’s a technology. That’s a powerful thing because I had likened it to the ’90s when a lot of people experienced the tech, the ’90s dot-com bubble. Think of when the internet was coming out. How many people didn’t see how it would transform their lives? We would have companies that completely are digital. We would be interacting the way we are now because of this powerful technology.

A lot of companies were formed during that time that ended up going under. They went bust. Anyone can create a cryptocurrency and a website. Some of those companies went on to become Amazon’s and major players in the space. Others drew down and then went completely busted. I urge people to be a little bit cautious. I want people to start seeing Bitcoin as what it is, which is essentially the internet of money. In the same way that the internet has no CEO, it has no headquarters. It has no central point of failure or authority that’s behind it, Bitcoin is the same way.

It’s completely decentralized around the entire world, and no one can affect change without the consensus of everybody else. It’s truly unique in that space. Whereas other cryptocurrencies, you can’t say the same for them. In the same way that in the dot-com bubble, we had some things rise and fall, and rise and succeed to become the biggest companies. We are going to see the same thing in the tech space. Some of that is happening now.

We don’t have bailouts in cryptocurrency. It’s a system that is not regulated, and it’s the Wild Wild West because it’s so new and nascent. People will potentially lose money, potentially gain a lot of money. Bitcoin, at the foundation of that, is the internet version of money that can transform not only our ability to save. It’s a powerful savings technology in-store value but also our ability to transact with one another across the world without third parties taking a cut.

It’s powerful. It’s important to look at it. You have to zoom out. We see this volatility with everything, stocks, bonds, crypto, and Bitcoin. Everything is coming down because of the greater macro picture. This is a long-term horizon. This is a long-term investment that hopefully will allow you to help plan for your future and your family. Even though things drawdown, that’s sometimes the best time to buy. It’s the best opportunity to create wealth because you’re buying when it’s low, and then hopefully, you are watching it appreciate. It’s volatile. I urge people to be careful with some of the things they invest in but Bitcoin is that long-term bet that I’m confident about.

I lived through the dot-com boom. I just started my first company in software and got caught up in the dot-com crash. My company went out of business because even though we weren’t a dot-com, all the tech companies got flushed down the toilet in a matter of a few months. For me, it was going to MBA school, CEO school, and an entrepreneur school all at the same time. It was amazing. I have talked in the past on several episodes both about my own dot-com experience and investing in that period, and seeing the market crash.

I have been expecting to see these huge dips because a couple of years after ‘97, and ‘98, everything went up, and then in 2000, everything crashed into the ground. At that time, it was related to just the tech stocks, as opposed to the story that you told about your family in 2008 when the market crashed. I lost my house at that point as well. I was in real estate. I lost my livelihood and my house because I lost my livelihood. That was everywhere. It wasn’t limited to the tech sector.

 

There’s a lot of fear with it, especially among women. It’s not exclusive to women but I feel, especially women, there’s this energy. I talked about this in an episode. We have this feeling of, “If the big guys are losing all their money, what am I going to do that’s better than what they are doing? How should I even begin to get into the market if I don’t have that economic degree or that financial experience?” What do you think about that?

I completely agree with you, especially because the tech space at large is dominated by so many men. There’s almost a gaming aspect to it. Women are inherently a little bit dissuaded from those types of spaces. We play risk carefully, which is great because we want to take care of ourselves and our families in the future. That’s the thing about Bitcoin that is so beautiful. People see it as risky. I will agree with one thing that is volatile in the short-term. I see it as one of the most risk-free investments you can explore.

We have created this monetary system over the last several decades in this country that requires you to have to earn the money that you make twice or gamble it essentially. I’m sure you have people in your audience that do everything from hairdressers to doctors, to accountants, to media professionals, whatever it may be. The money that you earn in whatever job you have, you have to take that money that you make in your job and go, “If I put it in the bank, I’m going to lose money because of inflation.” The interest rate on that bank account is 0.00% whatever.

The traditional method has been to turn your house into a savings account. Everyone says, “This is the value of my house. When I sell it, I have to buy an extremely expensive house the next go-round.” We have had, in the ‘90s, what developed is the stock-bond portfolio, the 60/40 portfolio. People started moving into stocks, especially over the last decade. That inherently has a lot of risks. All of a sudden, you have to research companies. You have to have a portfolio manager. People are becoming day traders. It’s like, “Why does it have to be so hard to take the money that you earn and see it increase or at least maintain in value over the long run?”

That is what Bitcoin was designed for. That’s the beauty of it, as our money supply expands, especially the people at the top that get the first access to it because they are closest to the money printer, politically connected or part of big companies. They get to allocate it and purchase up all these stocks, stock buybacks, buy assets, and inflate the stock market. They buy real estate, and all of that goes up. The middle class and the savers get crushed because they are dealing with inflation. That’s not a system that’s fair.

Bitcoin was designed to address that by making sure that it’s a technology network that will never have its supply expanded. There will only be a certain amount of Bitcoin that is ever created, and no one can control it. No one can operate it. It’s a completely decentralized network in the same way that the internet is decentralized. We have the potential for a savings technology that, as we zoom out, is only going up in value while the purchasing power of the dollar is declining.

It’s powerful that women should start to look at the space as a great opportunity. We want to be part of that financial transfer, that wealth transfer that potentially could happen with a technology like this. It is a way to take care of the hard-earned money that you make and want to protect. That’s the way I view it. I don’t look at Bitcoin as I purchase it and then watch the price. If you buy a house, do you watch the price of it every day? No.

It’s a long-term investment that you put away. This is how much I’m going to allocate as savings account for me to make certain decisions with my future, a house, and college, whatever it might be. Don’t look at it for four years. No one has ever put in money in Bitcoin, held it for at least four years, and lost money. That’s important to point out. I encourage women to get involved because all of us want the same thing. We want to be able to take care of ourselves and our families and plan for the future.

I take that a lot further. We need to return to some version of a matriarchal society. Women are being given a chance to show up in the world, not just as the nurturers and the caregivers of their families but as the nurturers and the caregivers of nations. When we have that opportunity, that allows us to take control in a way that allows growth, power, and wonderful things to happen from a space of the sacred divine feminine, not from the space of the masculine, we are at war because of a man said, “I want that thing over there. I don’t care that it doesn’t belong to me.” I feel women would have been more negotiable at that rate.

Why does it have to be so hard to take the money you earn and see it increase or maintain value over the long run? That is what Bitcoin was designed for. Click To Tweet

I recognize how few women are in this space. The ratio is somewhere around 15% to 85%. I want to do whatever I can to make women feel a little bit more welcome because the community is important to us as well. Bitcoin has been the most welcoming community to me. It’s allowed me opportunities economically that I didn’t even think were possible. I would love to share the message with moms out there and with other women that are working so hard at their jobs and feel they want to be able to figure out how they are going to afford a house, their future children or whatever it might be.

There’s a lot of suffering now. Unfortunately, previous generations have kicked the can down the road and placed a tab on us that has made everything so expensive that the average Millennial feels like buying a house is out of reach in many cities. That shouldn’t be the case, especially for people working harder and being more educated than ever. I would like to see a system that’s more inclusive in general.

The more we put power in the hands of women, financial power especially, the better off we will be. A woman shares between 80% and 90% of every dollar that she makes inside of her family and community. The statistic with men is 30% to 40%. $0.30 to $0.40 on a dollar is being shared inside by the family and the local community. Imagine how much more power in that community a woman’s dollar has. To me, when we put the money in the hands of the woman, we are gifting the whole world to become a better place. We are gifting them that opportunity. That’s important.

It’s interesting because I have a different gauge that I used for my 15%. I walked around the Bitcoin conference, and I used my eyeballs. I asked, “What percentage of the people here are women?” I heard 15% and I was like, “There you go.” That’s the statistic I have been using. I’m happy that it turned out it was accurate. What do you feel are the pitfalls of the dollar as we move forward in time?

Sadly, we are in a position of growing weakness with the US dollar. We have come to a place where we are globalized. We rely on trade with a lot of different countries, and sadly, we have exported a lot of our wealth. We are a country that used to manufacture a lot here. As a result, we did have stronger labor and working-class here. It’s because of the dollar becoming the global reserve currency and the Petrodollar we have exported our dollars out. We have made it cheaper to have labor overseas.

Explain Petrodollar. That’s not a phrase that anyone has heard on the show yet.

Two things happen in the 1970s that are of great consequence. Number one is Richard Nixon took us off the gold peg for the US dollar. That means that prior to that, for the most part in the history of the United States, you could redeem your dollars and your paper notes for gold at the bank. Our US currency was backed by gold. If US citizens couldn’t redeem the money for gold, other countries could. The dollar had reserves in central banks that were maintaining the value based on a scarce commodity, which was difficult to produce, which was gold.

Nixon took us off the gold peg and essentially allowed the free market to judge the value of gold. US dollars essentially became backed by the faith of the US government and a powerful military. There’s a beautiful website that I urge people to go to called WTFHappenedIn1971.com. It’s a page of dozens and dozens of charts of the price of the cost of living ever since we ventured off the gold peg. It shows you the cost of Campbell Soup, the cost of apartments, and wealth inequality. Everything balloons and goes parabolic after we lost that gold peg.

The second thing that happened was our government officials came into an agreement with countries that produce oil, namely Saudi Arabia, being one of them saying, “You can only accept dollars across the whole world for payment.” Every country became dependent on making sure that they had the dollar in reserves because if they wanted to purchase oil and energy, they needed to pay for it in US dollars. It was this monopoly that was created.

 

At first, it had the initial effect of being a boon for America. A lot of wealth immediately came to the United States, and there was a huge demand for our dollars. In the long run, it’s growing into a situation that’s impoverishing a lot of people. As we export our dollars and hyper-inflate other currencies, we also lose the middle class. We lose manufacturing. A lot of people complain, “My jobs are overseas.” We are importing a lot of goods that are made cheaper somewhere else because we made the dollar so strong essentially. That’s what happens.

It gets a little bit complicated into the weeds of macroeconomics, but that’s essentially how it works. We initiated a situation where every single time our economy tried to cleanse itself of bad investments, people poured money into projects that maybe were good or bad. The economy would start to crash down the Federal Reserve, which is essentially maintaining our government money supply and printing money.

It’s neither Federal nor a reserve, which is always important to point out at that level.

We didn’t elect these people. They rush in and essentially flood the economy with more money. They need to save the popping of the bubbles. The problem is when you save the bubbles, it’s the people at the top that are getting saved, the people that took the most amount of risk that should maybe potentially have failed. Instead, we pop up the bubble even bigger. That’s what we have seen over the last few decades. They rushed in with money printing after the dot-com bubble.

They re-inflated that a lot of that money went into housing. We inflated a housing bubble, then that collapsed. For the last more than ten years, we have been quantitative easing and providing liquidity and stimulus to the economy. Now we have a bubble of everything, to be honest with you. We have a housing bubble. We have an equities or a stock bubble. We have an everything bubble that was accelerated and made even bigger with more pressure that we are feeling deflate because of the pandemic.

All of a sudden, they needed to respond and print even more money. Here’s what I want people to think about. Many of these politicians on both sides of the aisle say so often, “Our economy is strong. It’s never been stronger. I made it strong.” If our economy was that strong, number one, we wouldn’t be in great debt. We wouldn’t be the world’s largest debtor nation.

Number two, a pandemic, which was supposed to last only two weeks, the initial closures wouldn’t have completely ground everything to a halt and caused everyone to become on the brink of sudden bankruptcy with people having no savings and no ability to pay unless the government stepped in and helicoptered money.

Is that a healthy economy? No one has savings. No one was able to handle a closure. It’s because our system is based on debt. We have so much debt. How do we get out of it? We have this everything bubble. Now the Federal Government is coming in and saying, “We printed too much. We need to raise interest rates. And make it more expensive to borrow. We need to start to slide some of the money off of our balance sheet because we are too far in debt.”

As that bubble contracts, we are seeing everybody sell everything. They are selling stocks, crypto and Bitcoin. I don’t know how far down it could go but it’s volatile times as the result of our whole money system. It goes back to these decisions that have been made over decades and history that many of us probably never even learned in school. It’s the fact that Nixon took us off the gold standard and made our dollar, our paper, you can print it out of thin air however much you want, and the Petrodollar where everyone has to use the dollar to purchase certain commodities.

Bitcoin is that beacon of hope that we can rebuild something based on real value, more accessibility, and inclusion. Click To Tweet

We see a transformation. A lot is going to change as more countries go into the digital currency space with central bank digital currencies. Countries are de-dollarizing. We are saying, “We are going to sanction you.” Countries are saying, “I have gold in my reserves. I have a digital wand in my reserves. We are going to change our system if the US government is going to try to maintain its monopoly.” A lot will change over the next several years. This shines a light on the importance of having Bitcoin, which no one can control and manipulate, as opposed to some of these changing factors and geopolitical issues.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. I learned some new things. I’m excited about that. Nobody taught us in school unless it was at a higher education level. That’s pretty clear. You sound like you have been to an economic school, and I’m sure you have, the economic school of the world because you are paying attention. You have all these great guests on your show. This information is available for us to learn. There isn’t a rule that says, “You have boobs. You are not allowed to learn it.”

Even if it was not explicit, there was this pat you on the head and like, “That’s okay, sweetie. Your husband will teach you this stuff or take care of it for you because he never taught you.” We don’t have that anymore. We are able to save ourselves and be sovereign entities. That’s important because the stuff that you are talking about helps if you know where we have come from so that you understand where we are going.

Right before the housing crashed, I knew people who were like, “We are going to a gold standard on Tuesday. We are going to a gold standard within fourteen days.” I still hear people say that but it’s not going to happen because that money doesn’t exist. That money that’s the gold is a limited amount. You can’t print more. That’s the whole point of the store of value. It’s a scarce asset.

I want to ask your opinion about this. I have found statistics that we have printed at least 40% of all the money in circulation in the last few years. We didn’t spend much of that money on our people. You are right. Nobody had any savings. The average savings in the US is something like two weeks of money, which is terrible. Yet there is this moment where it was like, “We are going to print all this money, then everybody will have money.” A lot of it didn’t trickle down to the lower or the middle classes. That reminds me of 2008 and the whole too big to fail.

I had the same thought that you did when you were younger, watching what happened to your parents. They are asking every citizen to repay their mortgages, holding them accountable for that, yet bailing out these big corporations. Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter for $42 or $44 billion if this happens. If you divide the fact that there are 330 million people in the United States, you could give every human being in the United States $1 million and still have lots of money left over. Which of these two things is a better use of our cash? What would happen if every American had an influx of $1 million?

It’s important that we look at our past so that we can see what’s going to start happening in our future and, more importantly, what’s not going to happen in our future, which is stuff is not going to settle down and go back to “normal.” It’s important that we ask the question. If it’s not going to go back to normal, what can we look forward to it looking like in several years?

I constantly think about, “What does the world look like,” not only under the Bitcoin standard but the transition to a Bitcoin standard? Bitcoin is that beacon of hope that we can rebuild something that is based on real value, more accessibility, and inclusion. A lot of people accept things the way they are because that’s the way they have always been. The US has been known as a superpower. You go to work, and we get complacent in our lives. I hope to challenge that in people because at this point, unfortunately, in the direction that we are heading, our government cannot ever repay its debts. We say it in the Bitcoin space. It’s math. We have gone too far into debt.

We would need to essentially restructure our liabilities, which is a fancy way of saying, “File for bankruptcy,” and say that we are unsolved and try to fix that. We can’t do that as the global superpower and reserve currency. What do we do? We keep printing money to service the debt that we can never pay off.

 

What does that happen when they print money? The money goes to the people at the top. They buy more assets, more bubbles are created, and savers get crushed. More and more wealth disparity and pressure are down on society. We all get frustrated. We try to pick the politician that’s going to be on our team and promise us whatever we want to survive.

That’s what’s happening if we zoom out. Now we have this beautiful piece of technology that’s emerging. It decouples money, politics, and power for the first time in human history. It allows for the form of money that is democratic to rise out of this potentially. It’s almost like the flood is coming in, and we Bitcoiners have been building an ark. We were saying, “Come on. Everybody, get on the ark. We are going to usher.” The flood is coming no matter what. The debt is coming due, and no one can pay it.

Let’s usher in. Let’s go to a new world. Let’s rebuild from scratch and make it fairer this time. Let’s have it be a system where interest rates are based on actual prices. They are not manipulated and lowered or made to increase because of a central group of people that nobody elected. Let’s make it so that people are based on what they bring to the table. I provide this good or service. I create this company, and you judge it for the value that it has, as opposed to these fluff valuations that easy money creates in these bubbles.

It’s a way to build a system that could be hopeful and provide more prosperity and wealth for everybody in the future. Is it going to be completely equal and egalitarian? No, because some people want to sit on the beach. They don’t want to work. Some people want to work 70 hours a week. There should be more choices. People shouldn’t be working so hard for the money that’s worth less and less, which is what happens toward the end of empires and the end of governments.

People eventually become surfs, and the government centralizes. We have authoritarianism or totalitarianism. We don’t want to go in that direction. Bitcoin is about hope. It’s about rebuilding, decentralizing, and creating value that’s based on something real. I see a lot of hope. I would love to help people understand it because it can be intimidating, especially during crazy times. It’s the one thing that can usher in the future that is much more positive than the one that’s being created with the fiat system.

We are going to see a lot of changes. There’s always this gnashing of teeth when change happens. I have a background as a mindset coach. I am used to seeing people having a hard time with change. I’m looking at a bunch of old white guys who do not want things to change. Those old white guys are still, for the most part, the ones that are in charge and who have been in charge for a long time. Anything that we can do to challenge that system and to say, “That’s okay, but it’s not logical. That’s okay, but it’s not accurate,” that’s helpful because we are looking in the mirror and seeing the future.

We are the ones who are going to have to carry that future forward into our reality. It’s vital that we are asking those questions and saying, “You can’t put 70% warm water in the pool and say the pool is only rising 8%.” That’s not going to work. It’s important that we ask questions and challenges the mores of the society that we have always been told were, and therefore will always be. I don’t think that’s true anymore.

I loved what you said about Bitcoin being decoupled from money, government, and politics. It is because you said politics and government but also money. Money is part of that central system of governance. It’s controlled by the central system of governance, and Bitcoin can’t be controlled by anybody. I want to ask you one more question about that.

What I have been hearing from people as I have been studying these new worlds is that Bitcoin could still go to zero. Bitcoin could still be killed. I don’t believe that is true because it is unique in its development. It’s true that decentralization has given us the inability, like Pandora’s box is open, and you can’t close it again. What do you think about that? A lot of people, economists, and politicians are saying well, “You can’t trust this thing because it’s going to go that back to zero.”

Bitcoin is about hope. It's about rebuilding. It's about decentralizing. It's about creating value that's based on something real. Click To Tweet

When I hear that Bitcoin is going to zero from someone, I know then that they clearly have not researched the Bitcoin technology network much. I don’t believe that Bitcoin could go to zero in the same way that if we could place a value on the internet, I wish we could have that comparison. The internet, you can’t shut it down in every part of the world at the same time. It adds so much value to the way in which we communicate and exchange information.

Bitcoin does the same with value, transacting, maintaining, and storing value and energy. Bitcoin, in its entire existence, has never gone up and gone to zero. It’s gone up and maybe been volatile. When you zoom out, it’s gone up and up over the long-term, and it has never been hacked. It has never been shut down. There’s no way that you can shut down the Bitcoin network. It’s proved its resiliency over the last several years. Early on, it probably could have been killed if the government took it upon themselves to try to shut it down. There weren’t enough minors, and it wasn’t decentralized enough.

At this point, it’s a situation where it’s akin to the internet. You can’t shut down and ban the internet. It’s powerful. The only thing I want people to be careful with is that when you set money aside, you have to know that it does carry short-term risk and volatility. In the long term, it could potentially be a massive ability to save for whatever you want to purchase down the road. Digging in a little bit to the technology is important.

You don’t have to fully understand the computer science in the same way that you and I probably can’t figure out how to put together a car engine. We can appreciate a car, the value it brings our lives, and the fact that we trust it to take us places. In the same way, I don’t know how to program email or the early protocols that helps build the internet.

Bitcoin is essentially the same. It’s open software, an open code protocol that everyone can see that no one can manipulate and control. It’s based on math and computer science, which to me is truth. It’s a form of speech. There’s a lot of beauty in Bitcoin. I hope that people don’t look at it as something that could go to zero because, at this point, I don’t see how that could happen. That would be the same as trying to shut down the internet. That would mean Armageddon to me.

Unless the power grid of the world goes down, in this case, the Bitcoin or the internet. When people ask me this, I tell them, “We will have bigger problems, and it won’t matter. Some days someone will turn the power grid back on, and then your Bitcoin will still be there.” Another thing that people fail to realize is that’s true about all of our money unless it is being kept in a safe and unless it is gold bricks or your physical cash. If the whole world got shut down, your gold and cash would also lose their value.

Under those circumstances, you are going to want to trade the stuff you can eat. You are going to want to trade stuff that has legitimate utility in that circumstance. I agreed with you from the moment you started speaking. I’m so pleased. This is cool because you have explained things in a beautiful, easy-to-understand way for our audience. I have one more question. What’s one more thing that you want all of the women reading to know?

If you are not in Bitcoin, I urge you to read The Bitcoin Standard, reach out, and ask questions. If you are already in Bitcoin, things are crazy but try to enjoy your life, your relationships, and your connections. We lost my grandmother, and it reminds me how short life is. We all want the same things at the end of the day. One of the reasons I’m so passionate is because we are all human. We need a connection. We thrive when we are collaborative and when we work together. Much in our nation has caused us to divide and blame each other but there’s hope to come together.

We can do that in our own circles. We can do that with our families and with our loved ones. There’s so much beautiful life to be lived no matter what the price of Bitcoin is. I want to remind people of that. Sometimes we get bogged down with whatever we are doing and have the stresses of life that impact us. Take a step back. Take a walk. Take a deep breath. Hug the person that you love. Life is beautiful, and it will get better. I want people to remember that.

You said that if you zoom out, you get that different perspective. Everything you said to me is about zooming out. At the moment, you can have a crisis or something disastrous happen to you but when you zoom out, life is beautiful. I couldn’t agree more. Natalie, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your wisdom and your Economic degree from the school of hard knocks with the audience. I appreciate you being here.

If you enjoyed this episode of Goddess of Crypto, please comment, like, and share. I hope you will also check out Natalie’s Coin Stories, which is an amazing show. I will look forward to seeing you next time. Please share this with the women in your world, the mothers, the grandmothers, your daughters, and your best friends. Let everyone know about the new energy of money. I will see you next time.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Coin Stories – Apple Podcasts
• Natalie Brunell – LinkedIn
• WTFHappenedIn1971.com
• The Bitcoin Standard

 

About Natalie Brunell

Natalie Brunell is a podcast host, educator and media commentator in the Bitcoin space. Her popular show, Coin Stories, features interviews with Bitcoin thought leaders about their backgrounds and conviction for BTC. She is also a video contributor to Bitcoin Magazine. Previously, Natalie was an award-winning TV journalist and investigative reporter. For the last 10 years, she covered in-depth local and national news topics and holds an Emmy for breaking news coverage. Natalie is also an adjunct professor of advanced communication and visual storytelling at the University of Southern California. She holds a Master’s of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University.