ICYMI: Leveraging Bitcoin to Find FIRE

My recent appearance on the Future Signal podcast

In case you missed it, I recently joined Jarrett Carpenter on the Future Signal podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about how bitcoin transforms the path to financial independence—blending traditional FIRE principles with sovereignty, low time preference, and the compounding power of sound money.

🎥 Watch the full interview below:

Below are a few interesting nuggets from the conversation…

“Your real job is turning labor into compounding assets.”

Your job isn’t your title; your job is to figure out how to turn your work into assets that will work for you.

The traditional way is: go to school, get a job, work 40 years, maybe save in retirement accounts, then hope you can play golf at 65. The FIRE approach flips that. Be extremely intentional about your spending, stack assets as quickly as possible, and let compounding do the heavy lifting so your balance sheet replaces your paycheck.

When you make that switch, you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel—you’re not beholden to a boss or a schedule you don’t like; your assets support your life.

“Allocate to BTC at the percentage of your conviction.”

Think about where your conviction level lies on bitcoin on a scale of 1 to 100.

If it’s 25, do 25% in Bitcoin and 75% in stocks. If it’s 50, do 50/50. If it’s 75, do 75/25. Plot yourself on that graph and allocate accordingly.

You don’t need an exact science—just get exposure that matches your belief it’ll be here in 20–30 years, outgrow stocks, and give you the sovereign benefits you can’t get elsewhere.

Start by peeling off a slice of your ongoing contributions and DCA; let conviction and allocation rise together.

“Pursue total return now; buy income later.”

We should always be pursuing total returns instead of pursuing income or cash flow.

Income and cash flow today always come at the cost of total returns in the future.

Your income should come from the work you do, which you then funnel into assets that are growing at the highest total return you can get. Later, when you’re financially independent, create the income you need by selling down—don’t make yourself a forced seller now via dividends or “mailbox money.”

That’s trading an asset you want going up for cash that’s being devalued; it doesn’t make sense if the goal is the biggest, most liquid stack as early as possible.

“Sovereignty is the missing pillar in traditional FIRE.”

If your FIRE plan relies exclusively on stocks and bonds, you’re fully reliant on the financial system—you hold IOUs gated by intermediaries.

Access risk isn’t zero. With bitcoin you can hold your own keys: you control it directly and can operate completely outside the system you only have permission to access.

SVB was a wake-up call—boardrooms realized they might not make payroll over a weekend. That’s when sovereignty moves from theory to policy.

Even if you’re early in the journey, at least have some bitcoin you control unilaterally sitting next to your stock portfolio.

“A focused 4–5-year stacking sprint can buy back a decade of life.”

Because of how compounding works, if you take a four- or five-year period and ruthlessly stack—very conscious of spending, stacking as much bitcoin or stocks (or both) as possible—you can then start to let off the gas.

The work you do later has a much smaller marginal impact than those first few years.

Time-box it. Make it a team plan with your partner. Hit the sprint, build the compounding machine, and then enjoy more of your income earlier in life.

You don’t have to wait for a magic number; the balance sheet you’ve built often carries you without the same intensity—buying back years you would’ve spent grinding.

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Thanks for listening and reading!

For readers of FIRE BTC, this conversation is just the starting point.

For paid subscribers only, I’ve gone deeper into the next layer — how bitcoin doesn’t just reshape your path to financial independence, but what happens when entire systems begin to reprice time, trust, and freedom around it.

We explore how traditional FIRE breaks down in an era of AI, inflation, and monetary debasement — and how the bitcoin-FIRE framework restores sovereignty at both the personal and societal level.

If this episode resonated with you, you’ll want to keep going.

👇 Upgrade to paid to read the second layer — how the fusion of bitcoin and FIRE becomes a global movement toward financial independence, not just individual escape.

All the best,

Trey ✌️