“My shitposting is providing for this family!”
– rob@primal.net
Hello friends!
If you’ve been keeping up with the podcast lately, you know I’ve basically become a never-ending hype train for Bitcoin, Nostr, and the self-sovereign life these freedom technologies enable at both the individual and societal level.
Well, I finally decided to stop TALKING about what this future is going to look like, and go LIVE IT MYSELF!
It all started back on my second podcast rip with my man Paul Keating, where he floated the idea of renting out a house in Costa Rica (known for very high Bitcoin adoption thanks to the Bitcoin Jungle community project) to bring a group of fellow Bitcoin & Nostr addicts together under the same roof…
(skip to 30:40)
Well, Paul is a man of his word, and just a few months later, I got the call that it was happening!
Fast forward to April 2025 (4 months after we recorded that podcast), and I was on a flight from Argentina to Costa Rica, YOLOing into a month-long jungle adventure that I will never forget.
Welcome to the primal house.@primal_app 🌊🤙 pic.twitter.com/FrwD3nyYDJ
— ₿en Wehrman (@benwehrman) March 30, 2025
Even without the benefit of being surrounded by crazy Bitcoiners, living in a mansion nestled in the depths of the Costa Rican jungle was an unreal experience. But combining the two? It doesn’t get closer to tasting the future than that.
Here’s a snapshot of my average day while living in The Primal House:
1) Wake up
2) Make breakfast, eat while watching the sun rise over the lush, jungly hills
Kitchen view every morning 🤌🌅 pic.twitter.com/VPUeQ9ukOw
— ₿en Wehrman (@benwehrman) May 10, 2025
3) Go for a nature walk (we had the stunning Catarata Waterfalls + Rio Uvita a short hiking trail away from our house), and brainstorm on content I was going to create that day (podcast, blog posts, Nostr rants, etc.)
And what’s a jungle path with a giant waterfall to jump into?
smooth landings are optional.
sending for the boys is not. pic.twitter.com/UrqOSw8n8X— ₿en Wehrman (@benwehrman) March 30, 2025
4) Bring new friends from the waterfall home, and convince them to join Nostr
4) Naked sunbathing sesh in the private garden
5) Beat Shaun at Ping Pong
6) Jump on the computer, unload my brain into cranking out as much content onto NOSTR as my carnivore-nourished brain can handle, to accumulate a sizable pile of zaps.
(For those new to Nostr, “zap” is the verb we use for shooting a small amount of Bitcoin to a Nostr post ⚡️)
7) Pick up my meat for the week at Segura’s Meat Market (a sweet grass-fed butcher right down the road from the house)
8) Swing by the local farmer’s market for any other essentials I need (raw butter, raw milk, eggs, cheese, etc.)
9) Go lay waste to some poor souls at pickleball (which of course we always bet Bitcoin or steak on)
And you already know…Jungle Pickleball accepts Bitcoin! Thanks for the many fun nights with the squad, Roger!
10) Head to Playa Hermosa for the sunset + quality grounding time (we literally did this almost every night) 🌅
11) Go to dinner at Seba’s—a killer local restaurant that accepts Bitcoin—to enjoy the steak that I won from our latest pickleball bet
12) Head back home for a spontaneous living room jam session
This is what men need. pic.twitter.com/dW0MWpDano
— ₿en Wehrman (@benwehrman) May 10, 2025
13) Wind down with meditation, reading a book, and maybe listening to a podcast or two before crashing for the night 😴
14) REPEAT EVERY DANG DAY
NOW…here’s where the awesomeness of Costa Rica comes in 👀
As mentioned earlier, there’s a huge presence of Bitcoiners in Costa Rica thanks to the Bitcoin Jungle project, so practically ALL of my weekly buying essentials accepted Bitcoin 🤯
– The regenerative grass-fed butcher where I scooped all of my meat? Bitcoin accepted ✅
– The farmer’s markets where I got my butter & eggs? Bitcoin accepted ✅
– Seba’s, where the squad frequently went out together for steak dinner? Bitcoin accepted ✅
– Pickleball court? Bitcoin accepted ✅
Red light
Seed oil free
Shoes optional
Bitcoin acceptedMy kind of restaurant. pic.twitter.com/1MVP7JZ2JI
— Paul Keating (@thepaulosophy) March 31, 2025
If you know me, you know that as long as my meat plugs are covered, I’m all set. So, since they all accepted Bitcoin, I didn’t have to touch Costa Rican fiat currency ONCE this entire trip!
No ATMs, no exchanges siphoning up bullshit fees, no dirty paper bills to fumble around with in my wallet…just pulling out my phone at each place I needed to buy something, opening the Primal lightning wallet, pressing 1 button to pay, and DONE.
Paul was much better than me at recording how this worked in action 👇
So, to sum everything up, my entire life for a month in Costa Rica basically consisted of me flipping back and forth between:
– Creating content (writing, podcasts, art) that provided value to others (as proven by the zaps they sent me on Nostr ⚡️)
– Buying all the real-world essentials I needed with those zaps
– Enjoying nature and good friends every day, thanks to the freedom granted to me by the above 2 working beautifully in tandem
HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT???
Now, for transparency’s sake, of course there was fluctuation in how many zaps I’d receive on any given day, as the value-4-value ecosystem is still brand new and not large enough yet to provide a stable/predictable flow of income. While I did not track my total zap income vs. expenditures from the day I arrived (I definitely plan on doing this in the future for a more quantitative test), if I were to guess, I’d say the expenditures were probably roughly 25% higher than the sats I stacked for any given time period. (Thankfully, I had a decent stash of Nostr zaps already loaded into my Primal wallet from 3 years of shitposting, so I was able to cover that difference.)
BUT I DIGRESS…
The point I want to get across from all of this is not that anyone’s going to get rich quick from implementing this model today, but moreso that the Bitcoin/Nostr standard lifestyle is already here, it’s HAPPENING, and the road ahead for scaling it into a self-sustainable routine has never been clearer.
Folks…DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW AWESOME AND EXCITING THIS IS?
I cannot beat the drum on this enough.
If you’re a content-creator who dreams of making a living off of their creative talents, I hope you’re paying attention, because this right here is the crystal-clear runway to the dream lifestyle you’ve been waiting for.
Soon enough, for creators all over the world just like you, gone will be the days of having to slave away at a job you hate in order to be able to support what you actually want to do: use your God-given talents to create value for your fellow human beings on a decentralized protocol, without third-parties sucking your life-force dry through the inflation of the fiat currency you’re mandated to receive for your time and energy.
The best next steps if you’re ready to accelerate your path to this epic future?
– Study Value-4-Value, to get acquainted for the future of content-monetization (Start HERE)
– Get on NOSTR, so you can officially be plugged into the social network of the future (Start HERE)
– Start sharing your content on Nostr, networking, and familiarizing yourself with how Value-4-Value works on the protocol
– Raise your content game to the highest level you’re capable of so you can BUILD YOUR DECENTRALIZED EMPIRE!
With enough hard work, and the right future pieces falling into place on the scale of the Bitcoin/Nostr/V4V ecosystem, a truly incredible future awaits all of us.
TO THE FUTURE 🤙⚡️⚡️⚡️
-Ben
Bonus: check out this excellent podcast rip I recorded with lots of the guys featured in the photos above. We talked all about the Primal House, the future of social media, decentralized health, and lots more 👇
