We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jon Gordon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jon below.
Alright, Jon thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
The fiat healthcare system has become a centralized behemoth, filled with rent-seeking middlemen and profiting off of individual’s chronic conditions. As different participants in the healthcare industry have grown larger over time, including hospitals and health systems, health insurers, big pharma, electronic medical record and billing companies, and the government, our overall healthcare spend has grown while health outcomes get worse.
Bitcoin and nostr are open source protocols that offer decentralized alternatives to the current healthcare industry standard, enabling peer-to-peer interactions and exchanges of communication, data and value. In my consulting business, Satoshi Health Advisors, I am helping healthcare providers and companies integrate a bitcoin strategy. This includes bitcoin education, implementing bitcoin payments and treasury solutions, as well as go to market strategy. I focus on helping independent providers, including direct primary care physicians for example, that already have a direct care model outside of the perverse incentives of the insurance system.
I have also recently co-founded a new healthcare data company, NosFabrica, with the mission of enabling individuals and providers to hold the key to their own health data. By bringing Nostr – notes and other stuff transmitted by relay – to the healthcare industry, you will have the ability to control your health records over time, seamlessly bringing your identity to different healthcare applications, all secured via public/private key cryptography. You may not know that 1 out of 3 American’s healthcare records were hacked last year. It’s imperative that we move away from vulnerable, centralized databases and build new tools to empower medical sovereignty, where individuals are sovereign over their health data and identity with Nostr, and in control of their money with bitcoin, ultimately leading to a healthier life.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I have 9+ years of diverse healthcare industry experience, including strategy consulting for hospitals/health systems, payor business strategy, medical supplies product management, and startup business development and sales. I earned a BA in Economics at Northwestern University in 2015, and completed a double masters (MS/MA) in health economics and policy at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics in 2020. Once I completed my masters program and got married in mid-2020 amidst the COVID pandemic, I asked myself the question – “what is money?”.
This sent me down the bitcoin rabbit hole, questioning what I had been taught in school. I have been studying bitcoin for 4+ years now and strongly believe that bitcoin is the best form of money humans have ever discovered and has the potential to drastically change our reality. We’ve been on a 53 year fiat (by decree) money standard, that has led to the erosion of our health and our wealth. Bitcoin is peer to peer digital cash, a decentralized network with a fixed monetary policy – there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. In 16 years, bitcoin has bootstrapped with no CEO, marketing team or directors to a market cap of $1.5 trillion and has already had significant impact on financial and energy markets.
I started to look at the problems that I had seen facing the various healthcare organizations I had worked for in a new light. I realized that the healthcare system, which accounts for $4.5 TRILLION in annual spend in the US, has not led to improved health outcomes. The root cause of the problems are much deeper, and the industry profits from chronic sickness, rather than health. By viewing the incentives from the perspective of unlimited money creation, I understood why there were so many middlemen in healthcare and administrative costs costs so high. The individual is not at the center of their own healthcare journey, so I set out to change that by building ways for individuals to take sovereignty over their health.
I founded Satoshi Health Advisors to bridge my passion for bitcoin and healthcare. I have helped small business owners understand bitcoin and integrate a bitcoin strategy, including doctors, nurse practitioners, dentists, therapists, architects, e-bike shops and more. I deeply understand the challenges small business owners are facing, with perpetually increasing inflation making it harder to run their business in a centralizing industry. I am able to distill my understanding of the history of money, the current fiat system, and explain how bitcoin and the Lightning Network works. I then help the business implement bitcoin and Lightning Network payments and a treasury solution, while marketing to their ideal consumer that will resonate with their bitcoin strategy. This sets in motion peer-to-peer healthcare interactions, cutting out the middleman.
Through my service-based consulting work, I help clients reduce costs and increase the value of their business by adopting new technology, bitcoin. Money converges to one, and bitcoin meets all seven properties of money – scarcity, durability, immutability, acceptability, portability, divisibility and fungibility. My work involves finding creative solutions to help plug businesses into the bitcoin network and tap into this open and permissionless monetary network. The more merchants that start integrating bitcoin today, the less potential chaos there will be when fiat money not backed by any sound or decentralized asset – dies (which historically, it always has).
What also sets me apart is that I am a certified yoga teacher, specializing in Himalayan Kriya Yoga. I have written extensively on the connection between bitcoin and yoga. I often bring breathwork and mindset work to my clients, which helps them unlock their own creativity and finding their dharma, their purpose and drive to do what they do best. I bring my experience in healthcare and connections in the bitcoin industry to help my clients grow their business, and align personally and professionally. I am most proud of how I’ve found balance running my consulting business with being a present husband and father for my one year old daughter.
As a co-founder in my new product based company, NosFabrica, I want to continue to help healthcare providers find meaning in their work and break free from the system, while enabling individuals to take personal responsibility in their own health. We are early in this new business, yet I feel the energy for a new way of storing healthcare records that restores privacy, security and restores the patient-doctor relationship.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
When Covid hit, my wife and started living a nomadic life style while working remotely. Throughout 2020 and 2021, we road tripped around the US and Costa Rica. As I was learning about bitcoin and El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender, I felt a strong call to experience it myself. In November 2021, I went to the first Adopting Bitcoin conference. As my job at a medical supplies company started calling people back into the office outside Chicago, I realized that it wasn’t for me. I had joined the business to work on a new product launch; when COVID hit, we couldn’t sell this new product to hospitals and I moved into a traditional product role and I knew I could do more. I decided to quit my job, and my wife and I traveled to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and ultimately Bali.
We had a week-long quarantine in Jakarta, Indonesia, where we were not allowed to leave the hotel room or even open a window. The Covid required stop on our way to Bali was a constant reminder of the challenges that individuals and communities have faced throughout the pandemic; from restricted freedoms to widespread decline in overall health, Covid exposed the brokenness of our current healthcare system and has accelerated the need for significant change.
While in Bali, I completed a three-week yoga teacher course and additional weeklong Himalayan Kriya yoga training. Through the practices I learned more about my body and the power of the breath, and reflected deeply about my dharma, or purpose in life. I manifested, dreamed up an opportunity where I could leverage my extensive experience and education in healthcare and combine it with my passion for Bitcoin adoption to help bring about positive change to individuals, families and communities. What I envisioned then has now become Satoshi Health Advisors and NosFabrica in many ways. This path away from a 9-5 and self-discovery journey has led me to pivot in business and in my approach to life, prioritizing flexibility, freedom and family.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
The book the Sovereign Individual written by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson and published in 1997 has had a significant impact on my entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy. The book tells the larger cycles of history through of lens of rising and falling centralizing and decentralizing forces, and foresaw the impact the internet would have on our lives. As a digital nomad who has embraced money without counterparty risk, I feel like I am living the life they saw possible nearly 30 years ago. As an entrepreneur, I can work anywhere with an internet connection, and as the book says, “go where you’re treated best”. We are seeing stark differences in country policies towards digital nomads, bitcoin, and ultimately freedom. This book, along with The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth, highlighted for me the importance of bringing bitcoin to more businesses to bring about a business ecosystem focused on delivering value, rather than inflation that steals your time. I find myself wanting to collaborate with individuals that take aligned action and towards creating a parallel economy based on free market discovery, fairness and truth.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.satoshihealth.com/ https://nosfabrica.com/ https://the-bitcoin-yogi.ghost.io/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jongordon9/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-gordon-29942162/
- Twitter: https://x.com/thebitcoinyogi