In this episode, I sat down with Scott Ellam, founder and CEO of XCE, to unpack a business model that I think could become a real reference point for how Bitcoin gets used in the real economy. Scott explains why executive recruitment is full of profitable but structurally illiquid firms whose owners often spend decades building valuable businesses without any realistic exit. XCE is trying to change that by acting as a public acquisition vehicle for those firms, using a Bitcoin-backed balance sheet and listed-company structure to create a capital market where one barely existed before.

We dug into why this works specifically in recruitment: headcount drives revenue, margins are strong, and owners are often trapped between preserving cash, retaining talent, and hoping someone eventually buys them out. Scott argues that Bitcoin doesn’t just sit on the balance sheet as a treasury asset here—it helps create trust, auditability, long-term alignment, and a performance-based upside that can attract both sellers and top recruiters. We also got into custody, optionality, competition, and the longer-term vision: if this model proves itself in recruitment, it may become a template for other human-capital-heavy industries that have the same fragmentation, same private-market friction, and same need for a credible way to unlock value.

• Scott Ellam and the XCE team page: https://xce.io/meet-the-team/
• XCE (Connecting Excellence Group): https://xce.io/
• Spencer Riley: https://www.spencer-riley.com/
• Cartwright Pension Trusts: https://pensiontrusts.cartwright.co.uk/
• Elektron Energy: https://www.elektron-energy.com/

In this episode, I sat down with Rob Wallace of Bitcoin News for a wide-ranging conversation about two sides of Bitcoin that don’t often get treated together carefully enough: institutional adoption and personal responsibility. We unpacked why firms like BlackRock were drawn to Bitcoin in the first place, how moments like the 2022 gilt crisis and the 2023 banking panic changed the institutional calculus, and why Bitcoin keeps showing up as “crisis money” when the legacy system starts to wobble. Rob brought a market veteran’s perspective to the conversation, while I pushed on what it means for Bitcoiners to think clearly about power, incentives, and the lessons we should actually be learning from past fights inside the protocol and the broader ecosystem.

The back half of the conversation turned hard toward self-custody, security, and culture after the recent COLDCARD fallout. Rob and I talked through what too many people still misunderstand about hardware wallets, recovery, test transactions, multisig, and why generating your own seed with dice may need to become a true Bitcoin rite of passage. We also got into education, pleb slop, the role of media and memes, the importance of communities like the Bitcoin Bugle and the “red team,” and why Bitcoin ultimately needs more people who understand it deeply, not just people who believe in it superficially.

• Bitcoin News: https://bitcoinnews.com/
• Rob Wallace | Bitcoin News podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/rob-wallace-bitcoin-news/id1854168780
• libsecp256k1: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1
• Ian Coleman BIP39 Tool: https://iancoleman.io/bip39/

In this episode, I sit down with Rob Hamilton to talk through one of the themes that has quietly connected a lot of our conversations over the years: risk. We unpack the difference between living with risk versus explicitly pricing it, why Bitcoiners are often strong at spotting failures in banking and fiat systems but weaker at thinking from first principles about market structure, and why liquidity, credit, derivatives, and pricing across time matter so much more than many people realize. Along the way, we contrast the maturity of fiat markets with the relative underdevelopment of Bitcoin markets, and why that gap makes it harder for capital allocators to evaluate major changes with confidence.

We also spend a lot of time on a core claim: markets are amoral, but unavoidable. If you want to influence a market, you can’t pretend you’re above it; participation, non-participation, pricing, and refusal to price all communicate information. Rob and I use examples ranging from miners and treasury companies to Bitcoin Cash, SegWit2x, ETFs, and hash-rate rental markets to argue that Bitcoin’s next phase requires better market signals, deeper liquidity, and more serious thinking about how information gets expressed when the stakes are no longer small. This was a fun crossover, but also a serious conversation about what Bitcoin still needs if it wants to be taken seriously at global scale.

• Magic Internet Math: https://magicinternetmath.com/
• AnchorWatch: https://www.anchorwatch.com/about
• Bitnomial: https://bitnomial.com/
• Shelling Out: The Origins of Money by Nick Szabo: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/