Paul Rogers

It may not be the biggest selling Bitcoin book (yet 😂), but I didn’t see any others at 18,000 feet!

@WalkerAmerica 🙏❤️

Yesterday was the worst day of my life and then the best day of my life… Worst because I thought I might lose my pregnant wife. Best because Carla and the baby survived and are stable. Thank you to everyone who sent their thoughts and prayers for Carla. It’s been an insane 24 hours… Carla is stable now and both she and the baby are okay, but it got really fucking bad really fast… Scariest day/night of my life… Carla is an absolute badass and at the beginning of the slow road to recovery, and I am so damn thankful. Posting this here for those who’ve been asking what happened: Carla started feeling weird yesterday afternoon after a nap. We were up all night with our son and had to take him to urgent care in the morning, so we were all resting before going to meet up with the family for Easter Sunday. When Carla woke up she had some back pain and was very clammy. She was a bit disoriented but still totally coherent. Within 10 minutes she was almost completely unresponsive. Barely conscious. Crazy disoriented. Hardly able to respond even with single words. Zero control of her body. Totally limp in my arms. Vomited. I called 911 immediately. Paramedics arrived and she was still barely responding and could barely open her eyes. When she did open her eyes she said she couldn’t see, her vision was black. They got her in an ambulance to the hospital. Her BP was insanely low in initial readings, like 55/38… got her to the hospital and BP remained dangerously low. About an hour she appeared to improve a little after multiple rounds of fluids. BP still super low but higher than before. She became lucid and ER staff thought she was stabilizing. She was shivering from the IV and had a bit of back and abdominal pain but it was manageable. They said we’d have to stay the night for monitoring but would be fine to go home tomorrow. But then she started having severe abdominal and back pain around her shoulder blades. Pain got to the point where she was screaming like crazy. “Worst pain of my life” (and she has an extremely high baseline pain tolerance). I’ve never seen her in such unrelenting agony like that… The pain kept getting worse and they did additional scans. The ultrasound showed a lot of fluid in her abdomen, likely blood. They started giving her massive blood transfusions and shortly said she needed surgery immediately. They thought it might be a ruptured ovarian cyst but wouldn’t know for sure until they opened her up. Got her into the OR about an hour after that. Doctor said surgery would take an hour… 2.5 hours in the OR the later the doctor finally came out and said Carla and baby were both OK, thank god… longest 2.5 hours of my life... It turns out they had to do a giant incision down her entire abdomen from too to bottom to find the source of the bleeding (because it was NOT her ovaries or uterus) and bring in a third surgeon who was on call. They removed **2+ liters** of blood from her abdominal cavity. For context, the average adult woman has about 4.5 liters of blood in their entire body… They had to remove her spleen because it had ruptured and was the source of the bleeding… the doctors described it as “battlefield medicine” because of the amount of blood in and out and how dicey things got… but thank god both she and the baby are ok. The doctor’s still don’t know why the spleen ruptured… it was a “non-traumatic” rupture, meaning there was no physical injury to the spleen which caused the rupture (~1 cm). It was a “spontaneous” rupture, which is quite rare apparently. They did note that the spleen was slightly enlarged but also not sure why yet. Waiting for pathology to see if that provides any answers. May have been contributing physiological/mechanical factors from pregnancy but we just don’t know yet. The reason her shoulder blades were in such intense pain was because blood from the spleen was pooling under her diaphragm, blood is an irritant, and apparently that triggers the phrenic nerve which the brain interprets as pain between and around the shoulder blades. Multiple surgeons said she was “this close”…thank god we didn’t waste any time. When one of the surgeons checked in on her today, he said she would have been “dead by midnight” without the emergency surgery and splenectomy… The doctors also all said this combination of circumstances is very rare. Spleens obviously burst all the time, but usually it’s directly related to intense trauma, which was absent here. They said this case is probably going to be in medical journals because it’s so strange. Carla is still in a lot of pain (we’re not even 24 hours out from the end of the surgery yet), but she’s handling it like an absolute champ. She was sedated and intubated with a ventilator until about 5AM this morning. This afternoon she was already able to get up and go walking multiple times. The pain is really bad, but should hopefully start lessening with each passing day. It’s going to be a long road to recovery, especially with pregnancy on top of it, but she and the baby are both OK and right now that’s all that matters. One step at a time. In typical @carlabitcoin fashion, she’s already been cracking jokes and trying to bribe the nurses. She even fired off a tweet while still a bit loopy from the sedatives but now she’s just trying to manage the pain. Thankful for the great doctors, nurses, and paramedics who saved her life and our baby. Thanks again to everyone who has reached out and sent their thoughts and prayers. I’m passing along your messages to Carla and they’re very much appreciated. This still doesn’t seem real. A normal day turned into a nightmare so damn fast… Hug your loved ones tight. Life is a gift. Don’t take it for granted.

Get your copy on Amazon or through you local bookstore.

@LanternBitcoin 🙏

The lantern is a metaphor for illumination, but also transmission. It is not the light itself; it is the structure that allows light to endure, to travel, and to be handed from one person to another across distance and time. The lantern is the symbol of a civilization that understands time as something carried forward, not consumed. The act of carrying fire forward was the earliest form of stewardship—the first recognition that what survives one generation must be intentionally protected by the next, because a lantern has meaning only when it is part of a chain. One person lights it. Another carries it. Another shields it through a storm. Another raises it to guide a traveler. Another sees its glow and lights their own. Without transmission, the light ends. We all share a responsibility to carry the light forward.

Stop scrolling on the usual silliness and absorb this. 👇👇👇 Very much aligned and consistent with what I present in my book. As someone said to me last night, the title is misleading since it’s really a book about consciousness.

@thecurioustales Excellent 🙏.

Great shelf. Now in a shameless plug, when you are ready to go beyond money and economics to the deeper potential of a new framework built on a Bitcoin standard and ethos, check out my book: Money, Love, and Bitcoin: Creating a Path to a Freer, Fairer, and More Peaceful World. If we really want to fix the world, we’re going to need to do more than just fix the money.

What’s in your bitcoin library?

@LanternBitcoin The Hero’s Journey is not the pursuit of likes. The algorithms are not the guidance systems of mythology.

Notification culture replaced myths with minutes.

👇👇👇

Shameless plug: Money, Love, and Bitcoin: Creating a Path to a Freer, Fairer, and More Peaceful World. If we really want to "fix the world" it's going to take more than just "fixing the money" which all these great books are about. As we all know, there's more to life than money. So, let's add that most important element to the mix: LOVE.

What book am I missing?

@LanternBitcoin Eliminate the words after “tax” in the first paragraph. 🙏

The discussion around de minimis tax exemption implies a future where we are still paying tax in the same way we are now. I wouldn't bet on it.

@alanbwt Congratulations! If it's in the spirit of the inspiring wisdom of your handle, it will be a great addition to the message.

Something has been on my mind since I first took the orange pill. A book about Bitcoin as a discipline. A way of life. And the changes one experiences along the path. Gigi was kind enough to write the Foreword. The Way of Bitcoin: Becoming Self-Sovereign

@LanternBitcoin Congratulations. Look forward to it!

I'm one month away from releasing my next book. Civilization can be viewed as an immense coordination problem across time. The mechanical clock was an innovation that enabled a standardization of agreement on sequence but the cost of that innovation was our base understanding of reality. Time is not what we’ve been told it is. Bitcoin fixes something much bigger than money. It is the foundation for a civilization that forms consensus differently. We are entering the age of time.

Just dropped my latest writing. Going beyond the truth of the blockchain to the more profound Truths of life. Buddha Buys a Chai, check it out on nostr. notestack.com/naddr1qvzqqqr4…

@SimonDixonTwitt Yeah, not what I had in mind for a “peace dividend”

Stock markets are how you privatise and take over an economy. You leave the population with the debt, while the stock market concentrates the value, owned by a smaller and smaller group of financial elites, often including foreign interests. The Israeli stock market is heavily weighted toward the military-industrial complex. It’s owned by the shareholder class. That’s the financial-industrial complex playbook. As more national value is concentrated in shares and ETFs, sovereignty weakens. We’ve seen the same pattern in the U.S., the UK, and elsewhere.

@MarylandHODL21 Probably nothing. 😂

Oh boy

@RudyHavenstein Three card Monte skills are a requirement to be in the system.

One of the most prescient and insightful comedy sketches ever. youtube.com/watch?v=pvjgIx…

@gothburz Stop I’m 😂😂 too hard.

I oversee AI strategy for a Fortune 200. My title didn't exist three years ago. Neither did 70% of the titles like mine. Chief AI Officer appointments were up 70% year over year in 2024. Most of us leave within eighteen months. The position has been described as "Chief of Nothing." Not by critics. By the people who hold it. One of my peers described the job as "trying to build a Formula 1 team while only being able to offer bicycle mechanic salaries." He was fired four months later. He was replaced within the week. The replacement was also fired. I've outlasted both of them. Not because I've delivered more. Because I present better. In 2023, McKinsey told the board that AI would boost productivity by 40%. The board approved $140 million in AI spending. In 2024, the industry invested $250 billion. In 2026, 6,000 CEOs were surveyed across four countries. 90% said AI had no impact on employment. 90% said AI had no impact on productivity. The average executive uses AI 1.5 hours per week. 25% don't use it at all. $250 billion. Ninety minutes a week. MIT studied 52 organizations that had spent a combined $30 to $40 billion on generative AI. 95% achieved zero return on investment. Zero. Not low returns. Not disappointing returns. The number between negative one and one. I presented these findings to the board. I titled the slide "Opportunity for Differentiation." Sequoia Capital asked the question in June 2024. David Cahn called it "AI's $600 Billion Question." AI companies need to generate $600 billion in annual revenue to justify current infrastructure spending. They are generating a fraction of that. Cahn's exact words: "We need to make sure not to believe in the delusion that has now spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the country, and indeed the world." I printed that quote. I hung it above my desk. As a reminder to believe harder. Our company bought Microsoft 365 Copilot for 12,000 employees. $30 per user per month. $4.32 million a year. Microsoft's total Copilot adoption rate is 3.33%. 15 million paid seats out of 450 million commercial subscribers. 96.67% of the people who could use it don't pay for it. Satya Nadella's response to this adoption rate was that people are using Copilot "a lot." TechCrunch put "insists" in the headline. Nadella made $96.5 million last year. A 22% raise. The raise was not tied to Copilot adoption. The raise was tied to the stock price. The stock price was tied to the AI narrative. The AI narrative was tied to the pitch deck. The pitch deck is the product. I know this because I've watched it happen. Goldman Sachs published a report in June 2024 titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?" The question mark is doing a lot of work in that title. Their own CEO, David Solomon, said in October: "I expect there to be a lot of capital that was deployed that doesn't deliver returns." Jeff Bezos, same month: "Kind of an industrial bubble." Sam Altman, same month: "People will overinvest and lose money." These three men run companies that are investing $602 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026. They said it's a bubble. Then they inflated it. I mention this at no meetings. Gallup surveyed 22,000 Americans. 49% of U.S. workers have never used AI. Not "rarely use." Never. The majority of the American workforce has not touched the technology that $602 billion is being spent on. Slack surveyed 10,000 desk workers. Two-thirds have never used AI at work. 93% don't trust AI outputs. When workers were asked what they'd do with time saved by AI, the number one answer was "more admin." Not innovate. Not create. More admin. We are spending $602 billion so people can do more admin. The Workday study found that 37% of time saved by AI is immediately consumed by rework. Employees spend the saved time correcting, rewriting, and contextualizing what the AI produced. The net savings: approximately 1.5 weeks per year. Minus the time spent in the mandatory AI training sessions. Minus the time spent in the meetings about the AI training sessions. Minus the time spent reporting on the meetings about the AI training sessions. I have not calculated the net. I suspect it's negative. I am not going to calculate it. Our last all-hands featured a live AI demo. It went well because I rehearsed it eleven times and pre-loaded the prompts. Google was less careful. Their Gemini launch video hit one million views. It showed the AI responding in real time to voice and visual cues. The entire demo was faked. Still images. Text prompts. Edited together. Google's defense: the video "shows real outputs" and they "made a few edits." A VP of Research later clarified it showed what the experience "could look like." "Could" is doing the same work as Goldman's question mark. GPT-4 claimed to score in the 90th percentile on the bar exam. Independent researchers replicated the study. Actual score: 15th percentile. The gap between the claim and the reality is 75 percentile points. I have seen gaps like this before. They're called pitch decks. Amazon launched Amazon Go. "Just Walk Out" technology. AI-powered shopping. No cashiers. No checkout. The AI was thousands of workers in India watching cameras. Because the models didn't work. Amazon called it AI. The workers in India called it a job. The workers in India were cheaper than the AI. This fact appears in no pitch deck. Klarna fired the equivalent of 700 customer service agents. Replaced them with an AI chatbot. The CEO bragged about it at conferences. Revenue per employee hit nearly $1 million. Then the chatbot started delivering lower quality. The CEO's exact words: "Cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor." Klarna started rehiring humans. They reassigned software engineers and marketers to answer phones. When asked if they had reversed their AI strategy, they said they had "not reversed or scaled back" their AI strategy. They had reversed their AI strategy. Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support jobs in September 2025. Marc Benioff said: "I need less heads." In January, Salesforce had already cut 1,000 jobs while hiring salespeople to sell the AI that replaced the 1,000. By February 2026, they cut the Agentforce AI product team itself. The team that built the AI that replaced the humans was replaced. They hired six new executives to oversee the replacement of the replacement. At the AI for Good Global Summit, Benioff had promised "radical augmentation" rather than job elimination. He then eliminated 4,000 jobs. The word "augmentation" and the number "4,000" were in the same fiscal year. There is now an SEC enforcement unit specifically for AI-washing. A company called Nate claimed its shopping app used "proprietary AI" with a 93% to 97% automation rate. The actual automation rate was zero percent. Zero. The app was operated by hundreds of contract workers in a call center in the Philippines. They raised $42 million. The CEO directed employees to prioritize processing test transactions from potential investors. He is facing two counts of fraud, each carrying a maximum of twenty years. Another firm, Joonko, raised $21 million on false AI claims. The SEC called it "old-school fraud using new-school buzzwords." A cannabis company called Flora Growth rebranded as "ZeroStack Corp" and pivoted to "AI-focused asset management." Their market cap: $6.61 million. Their EBITDA: negative $13.71 million. The CEO called it "a natural progression." From losing money on weed to losing money on AI. Naturally. My board has asked me for the ROI on our AI investment. I told them we're in the "investment phase." Erik Brynjolfsson at Stanford calls the next part the "harvest phase." I like that framing. The harvest phase is always next quarter. 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025. Up from 17% in 2024. 46% of AI proof-of-concepts die before reaching production. One in fifty AI investments delivers transformational value. Gartner said that. I cite Gartner in every board presentation. I do not cite the one-in-fifty number. I cite the one that says the market will be worth $1.3 trillion by 2032. Both numbers are from Gartner. I choose which one to present. That is my job. 76% of C-suite executives believe AI saves them more than 4 hours per week. 40% of workers say AI saves them no time at all. Only 32% of non-managers have access to AI tools. Only 27% received training. The executives who believe AI saves 4 hours per week are the ones with access, training, and assistants who do the prompting for them. They are measuring their assistant's productivity. And calling it artificial intelligence. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI chief, said in February 2026 that AI will replace "most, if not all, professional tasks" within 12 to 18 months. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, said AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20%. He also estimated a 25% chance it goes "really, really badly." These are the people building it. One of them says it will replace everyone. The other says there's a one-in-four chance of catastrophe. Neither of them has stopped. I was asked to present at our internal AI summit last quarter. The talk was called "Accelerating Value Through Enterprise AI." It was thirty minutes. I used fourteen slides. Eleven of them contained the word "transformative." None of them contained the word "zero." I got a standing ovation. Not for the results. For the confidence. The confidence is the product. My performance review says I have "successfully positioned the organization for AI-driven growth." I have not delivered AI-driven growth. I have delivered AI-driven positioning. These are different things. They pay the same. I'll make SVP by year end. The pitch deck is on slide 1 of every board meeting. The results are on slide 47. Nobody gets to slide 47. $602 billion. Ninety minutes a week. The 40% improvement was the pitch deck. The pitch deck is the product. And business is booming.

Well said. In economic terms, it’s a high time preference vs. a low time preference. In my book, I make the connection that our high time preference economic system spills over into so many other aspects of life such as our relationships and the behaviors you discuss. If one wants a truly deep intimate relationship it can’t be transactional and we must have a low time preference orientation. Keep up the great work.

@michelleweekley As I said at the Canadian Bitcoin conference where we met, if we want integrity in the monetary system we need to demonstrate it in the bitcoin ecosystem.

This is why you don’t play fiat games.