Everyone’s Overlooking This Marketing Channel: Why You Shouldn’t
Chris Koerner and Nick discuss when founders should outsource versus stay hands-on, then dive into proximity marketing at conferences: airdropping tracked links to high-LTV prospects via QR codes and AirDrop. They walk through the math on conversion rates and valuation, plus a speculative case that Jack Dorsey could be Satoshi Nakamoto based on timing, sailor references, and forum dates.
Chapters
Dollars to rent one for a day, renting it for $100 for an hour, and you could do that 10 times a day.
A viral growth hack that I've never heard of anybody taking advantage of.
If you do that to 100 people and one of them signs up as a customer, you're adding a quarter million dollars worth of value to our company.
I'm going to do it. Why would I not do it? Have you heard of these?
Yeah.
Tens of thousands of women come out to these.
They say good is the enemy to great. So I'm okay having good companies if my life is great because of it. You ready? I'm fairly certain I know exactly who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
I've talked to a few founders this week. This is something that I always find funny. I know you've heard me joke about it lots of times when you're starting a business, you're like, oh, yeah, I'll buy a business. I'll just hire an operator, right? Like, I'll just get someone to operate the business. Or they haven't ever gotten into the business yet and they're like, oh, I don't want to be working in the business. I want to be working on the business. I got to get out of the weeds.
Right? You've.
We've heard all these where people, we've said these things.
Yeah.
So. So I think this is a framework that entrepreneurs should think about and really, really take to heart. There's a period of time where you are the business, you're the business, and then there comes a point where you become the bottleneck and the business becomes the business. And this is how I'm kind of thinking about it. You go from having a job. We talked to Tyler. He's got a job right now. He's got no systems, no processes. It's on Google sheets. There's nothing that can be replicated. Pretty soon he'll have a high paying job, which will be great, and then eventually he will have a business. And the way that I define a business is this is an entity that can operate on its own, generating cash flows without you for at least three months. And the reason I said three months on there is because I really don't think any business should be operated without its leader, quote, unquote. Right. But there's a period like it has enough systems and expectations in place and SOPs that it can continue to run and operate without you. But it takes time to get to that point. And if you as the founder are thinking about, oh, I got to get out of the weeds. First, you're discounting the most valuable thing about your business, which is you. Because in the beginning of your business, your differentiator, your product, is you. You might be smarter than somebody in a certain way. You might have a specific skill, you might have a innate genius. Whatever it is, you're the differentiator. And if you try to remove that too quickly, you're removing your differentiation and your competitive advantage. So I like to think of it in three phases. Sorry, four phases. Phase one, where you're doing all of the work, you're the business, you're the agency. Phase two, where you start outsourcing things that are non differentiated. Payroll accounts payable, admin work. Okay? And then there's phase three, where you start outsourcing things that are differentiated but that are not your zone of genius. So maybe your sales process is different, or maybe your marketing tactics are different, but that's not, you know, Chris Kerner's highest and best use is not on the operations.
Right.
He may be doing something that's differentiated on the operations, but that's not his highest and best use. So you offload those things first, and then the last phase is you offloading your zone of genius. And I think what a lot of founders do instead is they focus on, oh, I just got to get myself out of the business right now. And they think they have to offload everything at first, and as a result, the business suffers because of it. They don't take this measured approach of like, okay, first, things that don't need me. Second, things that do need me but aren't differentiated. Third, the things that do need me and are differentiated, I'll do last. I just think that's a great framework to think about if you're starting up a business is, hey, what phase am I in? Where can I afford to be operating just so you have a roadmap for what's next and what's coming. What do you think?
I agree. And not only does it suffer because of the fact that they're outsourcing things too quickly, but they don't even know that it's suffering because they don't know what it would look like had they not done that. Right. There's no AB test for that. Let's say they're growing 30% a month. They step out and they're growing 20% a month. And it's like, oh, okay, yeah, I'm okay with that. But what they don't know is, like, they could be growing 40% a month because it was a seasonal business and they were rounding the corner to March and April. Right. And so 20% a month is actually half of what they would have done if you wouldn't have stepped out too soon. So that's the hard part is a lot of times you don't know what you don't know and you can't truly a B test life outcomes.
Yeah. And they fall in love with this idea of, oh, I'm going to remove myself from the business. It's going to be passive income. It's going to like, okay, maybe when you're a $10 million company, but you're trying to do that at like $200,000 a year in revenue. You haven't built the thing yet. It's not big enough to have the things that you need in order for it to be quote, unquote passive. You need systems, you need processes, you need SOPs, you need people. You can't have one without the other. But they're trying. They try to remove themselves way too quickly. We've done this. I mean, how many times have you and I freaking done this? Hopefully we've finally learned our lesson, but probably not. Yeah, we'll probably do it again.
I think this is true at any scale, size, business. I had this conversation just yesterday with someone about Elon Musk, who's winning the self driving car wars right now. I'll tell you, it's not Tesla, it's Waymo. Tesla should be winning. Tesla had such a head start. They had millions of cars on the road, billions of miles worth of data. Two reasons why they're not winning, in my opinion. One, Elon said we don't need lidar. We don't need it, it's irrelevant. Cameras and sensors are fine. Well, you're biased because you can't sell Teslas profitably with lidar on the car. Whereas Waymo is like, we need lidar, this is going to be a $300,000 car. But that's okay because we're just learning right now. And now Waymo's winning like they're winning in the accuracy department. Right?
Right.
My question to you, Nick, is if Tesla is the only business that Elon's running, there's no neuralink, there's no boring company, there's no SolarCity, anything, you name it. Are they still losing? I don't think so. I don't think so. I think Elon is the world's greatest entrepreneur, hands down, no holds barred. But the fact that all of his companies have CEOs that he's the owner, but he's not really in the weeds because he doesn't have enough time to be in the weeds that the CEOs, like they don't really feel accountable. Like only the owner cares about the business. I don't care how many shares the CEO owns or the executive team owns, they will not care about that business ever as much as the owner ever will. And if the owner owns six businesses, even if he has competent CEOs, I'm just saying it will be underperforming compared to what it could be doing if it was their only thing.
I'm going to say it a different way. I think that when big companies like that lose their core, their zone of genius, that's when you start to see the decline. And I'm likening it to these small businesses, right? Like, okay, Chris Kerner's zone of genius is growth marketing. Zero to one. All right? And if you started a business and that was core to that business and then all of a sudden you removed yourself from that business, it's not going to do as well in that area as you would have because you can systemize, you can still systematize everything, but at some point it's not as good as you. Apple is a very good corollary for this. It loses Steve Jobs and what happens? Still highly profitable, it's still growing, but they're not coming out with cool new products. They're not cutting edge anymore. And Tesla's probably an example of that. Right? Like Elon moves on to found other things. The LiDAR versus camera sensors debate. Yeah, they're losing on that. It's because the guy who's the driving zone of genius in that company has now replaced himself. So it is a trade off. I think at that scale Elon can do that and maybe he takes a 20% hit in market value. But if you're like a $100,000 business and you're an entrepreneur, you can't afford to do that yet. Like you don't have, I guess, flexibility to lose that much market value because your business crashes. But it's the same concept, right? Like you're removing the thing that made it what it is. It's not going to do as well.
Yeah. And you just have to be aware of it. Like I'm not even saying Elon's doing anything wrong. Like he's debting out way ahead. His net worth is, is way more that he has all these things. Right. And just like owning a hold, a Holdco or a parent company. Right, right. It's like, just know what you're going into. And you know what? That's not optimal. That's not optimized. That's not optimized. But that's okay. Because I want to own six different things and I'm cool with that. But like you said, if it's a $200,000 business and this is supposed to support your. Your income and you just quit your job, Just. Just know that. Yeah.
Because you're not. You're just not there yet. You're not Elon, you're not Tim Cook, you're not Mark Zuckerberg. You're running a B2B agency that does digital marketing. All right? Like, get to a million dollars in revenue first, and then we can start talking about whether or not you have a leadership team and what your ethos is. You can't borrow problems that aren't your problems yet. You've got to deal with the problem set in front of you, otherwise you're never going to get to 1, 5, 10, $20 million.
Yeah. They say good is the enemy to great. And my question is, like, what good or great are you measuring? Are you measuring the financial performance of a company or your quality of life? I'm measuring for. I'm optimizing measuring for the quality of my life. So I'm okay having good companies if my life is great because of it. Because if I have a great financial performing company, then it means my life is probably good because I'm not enjoying it as much. That's great.
So that's the thing I've been thinking about this week.
I like it. I like it. I got something for you. You ready?
All right, let's do it.
Let's just get back to the basics. We're going to talk about good old fashioned business ideas. You ready?
I'm ready. Freddy.
I think someone needs to start, like, think of Turo. Okay? For those who don't know, Turo is like the Airbnb for cars. You buy a car, you can rent it out to others, and it's doing really well. And. And the best turos are the interesting vehicles, like cybertrucks, right? If you buy a Camry, put it on Turo, you're not going to do great. Kind of like Airbnbs. Airbnbs are a little saturated. You want to do well, you got to have a fricking tree house on the side of a cliff. Okay? You got to be unique. Who out there is renting out, like, cybertrucks by the half hour or by the Minute or by the hour? I think that would be a thing. I think cybertrucks are a novelty. They're really cool, they're fast, they're Instagramable. People just want to see what it's like. It's $300 to rent one for a day. You don't need it for a day. You just want to take your girlfriend out on a date in it or something, or just test drive it. Why isn't there a system for that? What are we doing?
Okay, I'll give you my feedback. I think it's hard logistically. Okay, let's say you rent someone has it for an hour, then someone's got to go pick it up, it's got to go to a place, they've got to clean it, they've got to get it ready for the next person who's going to be renting it. So just inherently, obviously the per hour basis is going to be a lot higher than a daily basis. But then the per hour rate on a daily rental. But I think that's probably the biggest thing logistically. If we had self driving, then I think it becomes way simpler.
I think it's just a logistical issue to manage. I don't think you need to clean it every time, depending on how long you take it out. I think renting it for $100 for an hour, that's a great price. And you could do that ten times a day.
You could do the Chris Kerner special, you could go and market our usages of a cybertruck and then go rent a cybertruck for a day, just like have it planned out. Go run the cybertruck for a day and then take it and let people use it for an hour.
The hard part is insurance. When you do stuff like that. Obviously I'm never going to let insurance stop me from launching something. But imagine if you had a cybertruck, you had it wrapped, QR code, everything, drive this for a half hour, 30 minutes for $50 and you just start driving. It's like avail, like if you see me driving, I'm available right now. And you just start driving around like a walking billboard. Wherever there's, you know, downtown areas, bars, outdoor shopping, and it's, it's more of an impulse buy than anything. Kind of like an Uber driver just kind of drives around these areas waiting to get jobs, you do the same, but you're just giving rights and you sit in the passenger seat and they're governors put on it so they can't go crazy. And there is a Risk of insurance. But I think someone could make a lot of money doing this, and I think someone could make even more money if they did the harder route, raised a bunch of money, and launched a platform for this.
Your idea gave me an idea for something else.
That's the whole purpose of the show.
What did you think we're doing here, Nick? So would the truck have a QR code on it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Here's something I've always wondered and, like, I can't believe you and I have never spoken about this, because your mind, I know, would just take this to levels. It has hitherto been unforeseen.
All right, Moroni, you ever been.
I was on the plane flying back from Hawaii. I took a long video. My wife's like, oh, let me get that video. And what do I do? Do I text my wife that video? No, Chris, what do you do?
Airdrop it.
You got to airdrop that shiz because it's too big. It's too big a file format. So. All right, cool. I airdrop it. I go to airdrop it. There are dozens of people who I could have airdropped it to. I've been thinking about this, and I can't believe we haven't spoken about it, but it just finally popped back up. I don't know, because I'm not as creative as you. Okay. How could you use that for the. For a good bait and switch? Like, could you go to. And I don't know what the product would be, but let's say you have a product that you just want to get out. Or let's say that you want people to go and tune into your podcast and you just go to the mall and you're like, all right, I have a link to my podcast, and I'm going to airdrop it to whoever just shows up. You just airdrop it. It seems like a viral growth hack that I've never heard of anybody taking advantage of.
We're talking about ebasses here.
An ebas. What's an ebass, Chris?
It's an ethical bait and switch. Is that not the biggest oxymoron you've ever heard ever? So we've talked about these.
I've heard of a sea bass. I never heard of any bass.
So I love this. I've seen, like, memes and, like, reels about people that have trolled others on planes doing this, right? Like, taking a crazy, ugly picture and airdropped it to everyone on the plane. But you're right, there could be something there. It reminds Me of a reel that I posted a while ago of a, of a guy that posted QR codes all around the city and it just said, you cheated on me. I can't believe you did that. And then anyone walking by will scan that and when they scan it, it just leads to some guy's Instagram page, which is like the lowest and worst use of someone's captive attention. But it's the same principle. So I think you need to have something high ticket enough. You got to find that balance between mass market enough and high ticket enough because you're not going to be able to airdrop this to thousands of people an hour. Right? It's going to be like dozens of people an hour if you place. Because proximity, like you have to be close enough to that many people.
All right, I'm gonna go to me, let's say I wanted to promote the podcast. How could I do that? How could I go and find a place where many people are gathering at the same time?
Concert. A sporting event.
A sporting event. A conference. Conference. Maybe I go to like the industry conference. Like why could I not drop a thousand links to my podcast just walking around a conference?
You could. It reminds me of retention.com the software that, where you can basically swipe email addresses from people browsing on your website without them opting in. People do that, it's a billion dollar business. But those opt ins are very, very, very low intent because they didn't opt in, you know, so that's your problem. There is it's a low ticket offer. It's just a free podcast and it's low intent. So you can do it. How many people will actually subscribe and listen?
It's a spray and pray type of an approach.
Right.
If I'm doing email marketing or SMS marketing or whatever, it's the same kind of. It's just a numbers game at that point. Right. So maybe I spend zero money, but I go walk around a conference and I send it to a thousand people and I get five subscribers out of it, which would suck. I wish I, I got more, I didn't spend any money. I guess you count my time walking around the conference. Yeah. So I guess your framework would be much better. What would be a high ticket item you could do that with and where would you go to sell that high ticket item?
So let's go back to conferences. Like we're going to Holdco Conf in a month or two. Right. A conference for Holdco business owners. Let's say we had a competing conference. Okay. That was Six months later, we would. It would make sense for us to buy a ticket to this and airdrop this to everyone there and say, like, anyone who gets this Airdrop gets a 30% discount, but you have to book today. Like, that is a very captive audience. Like, it. It's captive. It's relevant. It has. You know, they can afford your conference because they just paid eight grand for this one. It's high. Ticket. Like, that could be, like, the sweet spot.
That's really interesting. What are some other, like, is high?
That's $12,000, let's say our lifetime value.
Higher than that. It's a thousand. A thousand per month.
So for $24,000, let's say that's our LTV. Our churn is close to zero. $24,000. Our margins are. They're healthy because it's just software. Right. But what kind of evaluation does that add to the business? I mean, this could be like a 10x revenue business from a valuation perspective. If you do that to a hundred people and one of them signs up as a customer, you're adding a quarter million dollars worth of value to our company.
I'm excited to try this, dude. Hold on.
Let's say that dog will hunt. Will that dog hunt? Hey, dog, are you gonna hunt?
Look at Chris over there. So we're done?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, That'll do it. Yeah, Daddy.
Yeah. Will that dog hunt? Is that dog gonna hunt, Daddy?
Oh, my gosh. We're so stupid.
I love this.
All right.
I love it.
All right. How's this for a hook? I'm fairly certain I know exactly who Satoshi Nakamoto is. What? I do. Okay? I learned it secretly by myself from a tweet that had over a million views.
Okay. Like, what am I supposed to say to that?
I'm so bad at this. I'm so bad at this. All right.
If it's Jack Dorsey, I'm going to be real butthurt.
It's Jack Dorsey. Why are you butt hurt?
Because we read the same tweet, and I. Yeah.
But most of our listeners have not. Okay. I, like many others, have been wondering this, and I've. I have never thought it was Hal Finney. For those listening that don't know the story, Bitcoin was created by a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto who's completely anonymous. There are lots of clues pointing to about a half a dozen different people. I'm convinced as Jack Dorsey. Can I tell you why?
Yes.
Okay. I read that tweet. I threw away about half of the Quote, evidences. Yeah. I'm going to read to you a lot of the ones that sound the most convincing to me. For those that don't know Jack Dorsey, he is the founder of both Twitter and. And Square, the payments platform. And for a while, he was running both of them at the same time.
At the same time. He's a billionaire.
He's a billionaire. Very eccentric, kind of weird. I heard him speak at a conference once. Very weird. Of all the tech companies in San Francisco, Twitter and Square were two of the very first to accept bitcoin payments.
Yes.
Hmm. Okay, so that's not in the tweet. I just find that interesting. One thing that never made sense to me, and the reason I thought it was Hal Finney more than any other person, is the fact that whoever is Satoshi is. Is worth a hundred billion dollars.
Close to that.
Yeah. Like one of the top 10, 20 richest people on the planet. Right. It's really hard to not sell that bitcoin. It's going to be really hard. I don't care who you are, okay? You either have to be dead, like Hal Finney is dead, or you have to already be wealthy and not really need the money. Jack Dorsey is a billionaire.
I'm going to go ahead. For those who are. For people who are like me, that are morons and haven't known this stuff for forever, bitcoin was invented, quote, unquote, invented, created, whatever you want to call it. 2010. What was the year 2010? Okay. Somewhere in that ballpark. And the creator, the founder of it, Satoshi Nakamoto, no one has known who he is, and there's been a lot of intrigue around it. Who is this guy? He created this thing, and then he just bounces. He just disappears. And as the price of bitcoin has gone up, because bitcoin is what they call an open ledger, you can verify every transaction. We know whose wallet is associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. And that wallet has just been sitting there untouched. So every year, even as bitcoin has gone up and down, we know, oh, it's worth a hundred million dollars. Oh, now it's worth a billion dollars. Now it's worth 50 billion. Now it's worth a hundred billion dollars. And people are just watching it.
Right?
And so that's why the theory is, okay, either this guy died and he doesn't have access to the wallet anymore, or. Or, you know, the keys died with him, or he doesn't need the money and he's, you know, doing something else with it. So there's been a lot of guesses. There was a documentary that came out recently that pointed the finger at who did it point the finger at. I can't remember who it was, but yeah, there's a. There's like a small group of people that it could be. I hadn't really heard Jack Dorsey's name thrown around until the last few years, to be honest with you. I don't know why that is. But this tweet that we're referencing, the evidence is Jack Dorsey has been hyper involved with cryptography since the beginning. He was one of like 2,000 cipher punks. In 1997, he wrote his graduate thesis on cryptography and doing something that would impact the world and then disappearing. He launched bitcoin around the same time that he was launching these other companies. He pulled. He started running Twitter and Square at the same time that Satoshi kind of pulled out of being an active member of the bitcoin community. And Jack has like played up the joke like, I'm going to airdrop a link to Volterra. I'm going to do it. Why would I not do it?
You have to do it. Do it. Do it in a certain way for me, will you?
Okay.
I'm just thinking of this on the fly. Okay. Google Doc, okay? The best copywriting you've ever put together in your life. I'll help you ChatGPT.
I'll ask you to do it.
Okay. Yeah, just like heart stopping copywriting. Because heart stopping copywriting combined with a really interesting marketing method such as airdropping strangers at a conference equals. They will for sure read everything in that Google Doc, provided it's not too long. So it's just like, yeah, this is awkward. You're sitting in a conference right now and some stranger just airdropped you. Guess what? That stranger's me. Here's why I airdropped you. This will be worth your time. I've been in your shoes. I've been a sniff administrator. You know what sucks about it? CPT codes, right? Or you're billing. Your billing coordinator is doing control find to find things to bill Medicaid for. It's the worst. What if AI could fix that for you? Da da da. Don't go too long. And then you just put a link in there, a tracking link, so you know who is clicking and are they clicking.
Oh, I'm so excited, dude.
Next Friday. A lot of money.
I'm back next Friday, so we will talk about how it went. And most of these people know me, so they're going to be like, why am I getting a text from Nick? What the freak? Like, they're going to read it.
Yeah. At what we think our LTV lifetime value and our churn is. I mean, $500 a month. Let's say they stick around for two years. Could be much longer. Okay, that's $12,000. Let's say our lifetime value, it's a thousand.
A thousand per month.
So for $24,000, let's say that's our LTV. Our churn is close to zero. $24,000. Our margins are. They're healthy because it's just software. Right. But what kind of evaluation does that add to the business? I mean, this could be like a 10x revenue business from a valuation perspective. If you do that to 100 people and one of them signs up as a customer, you're adding a quarter million dollars worth of value to our company.
I'm excited to try this. Dude. Hold on.
Will that dog hunt? Hey, Doug, are you gonna hunt?
Look at Chris over there. So we're done?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That'll do it. Yeah.
Daddy, will that dog hunt? Is that dog gonna hunt, Daddy?
My gosh. We're so stupid.
I love this.
All right. I love it. All right. How's this for a hook? I'm fairly certain I know exactly who Satoshi Nakamoto is. What I do. Okay. I learned it secretly by myself from a tweet that had over a million views.
Okay. Like, what am I supposed to say to that?
I'm so bad at this. I'm so bad at this. All right.
If it's Jack Dorsey, I'm gonna be real by hurt.
It's Jack Dorsey. Why are you butthurt?
Because we read the same tweet, and.
I. Yeah, but most of our listeners have not. Okay. I, like many others, have been wondering this, and I've. I've never thought it was Hal Finney. For those listening that don't know the story, Bitcoin was created by a guy named Satoshi Nakamoto who's completely anonymous. There are lots of clues pointing to about a half a dozen different people. I'm convinced as Jack Dorsey. Can I tell you why?
Yes.
Okay. I read that tweet. I threw away about half of the, quote, evidences.
Yeah.
I'm going to read to you a lot of the ones that sound the most convincing to me. For those that don't know Jack Dorsey, he is the founder of both Twitter and Square, the payments platform. And for a while, he was running both of them at the same time.
At the same time. Billionaire.
He's a billionaire. Very eccentric, kind of weird. I heard him speak at a conference once. Very weird. Of all the tech companies in San Francisco, Twitter and Square were two of the very first to accept bitcoin payments.
Yes.
Hmm. Okay, so that's. That's not in the tweet. I just find that interesting. One thing that never made sense to me, and the reason I thought it was Hal Finney more than any other person, is the fact that whoever is Satoshi is. Is worth a hundred billion dollars. Close to that, yeah. Like one of the top 10, 20 richest people on the planet. Right. It's really hard to not sell that bitcoin. That's going to be really hard. I don't care who you are, okay? You either have to be dead, like Hal Finney is dead, or you have to already be wealthy and not really need the money. Jack Dorsey is a billionaire.
I'm going to go ahead. For those who are. For people who are like me, that are morons and haven't known this stuff for forever, bitcoin was invented, quote, unquote, invented, created, whatever you want to call it. 2010. What was the year? 20. Okay? Somewhere. Somewhere in that ballpark and the creator, the founder of it, Satoshi Nakamoto, no one has known who he is, and there's been a lot of intrigue around it. Who is this guy? He created this thing. And then he just bounces. He just disappears. And as the price of bitcoin has gone up, because bitcoin is what they call an open ledger, you can verify every transaction. We know whose wallet is associated with Satoshi Nakamoto. And that wallet has just been sitting there untouched. So every year, even as bitcoin has gone up and down, we know, oh, it's worth a hundred million dollars. Oh, now it's worth a billion dollars. Now it's worth 50 billion. Now it's worth a hundred billion dollars. And people are just watching it.
Right.
And so that's why the theory is, okay, either this guy died and he doesn't have access to the wallet anymore, or. Or, you know, the keys died with him, or he doesn't need the money and he's, you know, doing something else with it. So there's been a lot of guesses. There was a documentary that came out recently that pointed the finger at who did it. Point the finger at. I can't remember who it was, but, yeah, there's a. There's, like, a small group of people that it could be. I Hadn't really heard Jack Dorsey's name thrown around until the last few years, to be honest with you. I don't know why that is. But this tweet that we're referencing, the evidence is Jack Dorsey has been hyper involved with cryptography since the beginning. He was one of, like 2,000 cipher punks. In 1997, he wrote his graduate thesis on cryptography and doing something that would impact the world and then disappearing. He launched bitcoin around the same time that he was launching these other companies. He pulled. He started running Twitter and Square at the same time that Satoshi kind of pulled out of being an active member of the bitcoin community. And Jack has, like, played up the joke. Like, he talks about Satoshi all the time. He makes references to him, like, and he knew all of these people, so I'm convinced, too. I wish I could take the other side here and be like, no, it's not him.
Well, let me read some things. I mean, also, he was asked on the Lex Friedman podcast if he was Satoshi, and his answer was, if I were, I would never tell you. Oh, okay, so some more evidences. He wrote a manifesto on making a mark without leaving a trace in 2001. Okay. He made a blog post shortly thereafter joking about that he was building something in secret that would be a payment network for drug traffickers. Okay. 2003, he posted a blog about how he's interested in cryptography. Pseudonyms, hacks, hacks happening at 4am specifically, and more. Posted in 2003.
Okay, so why the. Are we going to find out why the 4am we're going to get there.
We're going to get there. Yep. He posted in 2003 that he's trying to end his dependence on the US dollar and creating a barter network. He referred to himself as Jack J, A K. As a pirate. Like a sailor. He had lots of sailor references.
Okay. Like Michael Saylor, Like Michael Scaler.
Jack tweeted around the horn and home again for that's the sailor's way. Back in 2008, Bitcoin was created. The very next day, Jack's Twitter profile from 07 to 09 had him listed as a sailor. The original bitcoin source code included an old sailor's adage. Never go to sea without two chronometers. Take one or three. There are references to sailors in the bitcoin source code. Multiple. Okay. The original bitcoin source code documents are all timestamped at 4am Jack always talked about being a hacker at 4am okay. He accidentally logged in to edit the source code without masking his IP address, which he always did. And Satoshi, you're saying? Yes, Satoshi did. And it was an IP address listed in California. Okay, well, California's a big state, but that's where Jack was at the time.
Okay.
The first bitcoin transaction took place on Jack's mom's birthday. Satoshi joined the bitcoin forum on Jack's birthday. And Satoshi's last mined block was on Jack's dad's birthday. Now, this is something that I find pretty convincing. Satoshi in the forum told people not to donate Bitcoin to WikiLeaks. This was on December 5, 2010. Exactly nine days later, Twitter is hit with a secret court order with a gag requirement to turn over everything it has about WikiLeaks. So, like, this was happening in the background when Satoshi posted that, like, WikiLeaks do not support WikiLeaks. Nine days later, WikiLeaks comes out against Twitter. The day before that happened, before that gag order, Satoshi posted for the last time ever in the bitcoin forum. He never came back. Twitter's tech lead a year later suggested that Twitter is going to integrate bitcoin payments. Okay. Jack Dorsey calls bitcoin an amazing movement in September 2012. Square publishes a book in January 2018 to explain the legend of Satoshi Nakamoto in which it makes Satoshi, the Satoshi character, look like Jack.
Would people at Square have known that?
I don't think so. I don't think so. But who gave someone at Squared the idea to make that book in the first place? And then the last one, Craig Wright, who is a guy that has purported to be Satoshi. No one really believes that he's a total hack and a fraud. There was a big lawsuit involving them. Craig Wright's attorneys argue in early 2024 that if Craig Wright was not Satoshi, then the real Satoshi would have been expected to come forward to counter the claim. It did not dawn on them that the person countering the claim was Jack Dorsey, who was the basis for this exact legal challenge to begin with. Jack Dorsey came forward to counter the claim.
I guess I don't know much about the claim. Why would they have not known that Jack Dorsey had.
I think Jack Dorsey was just stepping up as like, trying to be a responsible party on behalf of bitcoin.
Okay, let me ask about some of those, the birthdays, like his mom's birthday, dad's birthday, Jack's birthday. Those are incident interesting Coincidences. And what were the things that were done on those birthdays?
Like, the last mind block, the day he joined the bitcoin forum, which is where all of this went down, and then the day bitcoin was created.
Because, like, so many. So many things were happening during that period of time. I'm sure that there would have been something where it's like, you could have chosen his mom's date and found something that happened. But those are. I guess those are pretty important things.
For there to be three is kind of. Kind of crazy.
Is Jack known to be a guy who's like, into sending secret messages like that? I guess if he's into cryptography, he is.
Right, Right. People think of Satoshi as like some really smart, nerdy guy in a closet. But bitcoin is not just code. It is a business. Like, bitcoin is a business. A business has to grow. A business needs to acquire users, a business. The best businesses acquire network effects like Uber or Facebook. Bitcoin has all those things. Twitter has those things. Square has those things. Right. Millions of people selling products through Square. Jack is a hacker. Like a growth hacker, a marketer, a businessman, a coder. He's all of the above. I feel like it takes a genius like Elon or Jack to actually get something like this out to the world. Like, there are probably a lot of people that could write the code for bitcoin, but who can actually grow it like a business. Like, I think Jack has done well.
And if you look at it, Satoshi didn't just create this thing in his closet and then, like, release it to the world. There have been a lot of people who have worked on this. I can't remember his name. This guy came out and was like, hey, you have this backdoor into that could allow anybody to access any bitcoin wallet at any time.
Oh, cool.
So they. They, like, you know, they fixed it. Bitcoin cash is a fork off of bitcoin. Litecoin is a fork off of bitcoin. Like, that's why Hal Finney was so important and thought to be satoshi, is because he was actually contributing to the creation of bitcoin. So it, yes, there was like this thesis, but then over time, a group of people worked together to create bitcoin. And there's still a group of people that manage bitcoin, so to speak. The miners secure the network. People who are mining new bitcoins. They're the first statement in the ledger. So they're making sure that we continue to have very clear Delineation of provenance. Where did it come from, who did it go to and where is it now? So it's always been a community. Like, it is a social network in that sense. Kind of a weird way to think about it, but it is.
Yeah, I'm convinced. Like, I'm just convinced. I don't think those bitcoins are ever going to move. I think it's Jack Dorsey. He doesn't need a few more billion. And I think it's amazing, it's incredible. If that bitcoin moves, bitcoin crashes, right? Period, end of story. Because it's like people that own bitcoin or people that are in the know, it's supply and demand. Like, we're writing that off. And there have been a few times, like with this, these court orders when we thought that bitcoin was about to move and bitcoin crashed because people just thought satoshi's wallet was about to move. And Jack knows that. So whatever he gains monetarily, he loses in the grand scheme of things because the total market cap drops.
Satoshi's kind of became, become this myth, like figure. If anybody was to be outed as Satoshi, it'd be, it'd be a letdown. It doesn't matter who it is. It would be a letdown. Yeah, like, oh, man, it was because you've like built him up to this mythical, like, figure. I mean, people have theories that he came from the future. It's like, oh, he came from the future to create. I don't know if you've read any of those. I go down all those rabbit holes. Like, he came to the future because he knows the dollar is going to crash. And so he wanted to create a currency that would. And I was like, what? Well, okay, this is a well thought out theory. I guess. I, I more mean from the standpoint, I don't know that he wanted to sell Twitter. He could have had the money to buy Twitter if he had gone. And there are now sophisticated financial instruments that will allow you to borrow against bitcoin as an asset. Right. So he, he could have done that. I guess there would have been a risk that it would have leaked.
It would have, he would have had to have moved it, though. You can't keep it in your own wallet if you borrow against it because you have to collateralize it. You've got to like, put it with an escrow service and then you borrow against it.
Okay. So you can't collateralize it unless it's in a third party.
One of the arguments against it was he was too busy. He was too busy founding, you know, Twitter and Square to do it. And it's just like. That's like saying Elon couldn't have founded, you know, the boring company Neuralink. Like, you name it. Like, it's Parkinson's law. These guys, like, they need to be found compounding five things at once. That's how they operate.
Well, I think that's part of it, but also they're complementary, all of them, and their accelerants. And, like, the underlying philosophy of Twitter was like, they would never go in and delete tweets. It would be there. It's a public record. It's the open ledger, kind of, so to speak. Right. And it's. Yeah, the network is supporting it, same with the payments platform that he's doing with Square or Block. Now, the idea was to. To disrupt our current payment system, which is. Is still primarily ach, which is just nuts to me. All right.
Anyway, I thought that was cool. All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.
