#120 AI, Bitcoin Security & Self-Custody: How Casa Protects Your Wealth | Paul Brower

**Roy Coughlan** (0:02)
Welcome to The Crypto Podcast. You can find all our episodes on the cryptopodcast.org.
What happens when you push artificial intelligence inside one of the most secure and high stakes environments on the planet? A system protecting billions of dollars in Bitcoin. Today's guest has been living that question every single day.
Paul Brower is a Director of Engineering at CASA, the gold standard in Bitcoin self-custody, where he leads a 12% team building AI-first workflows in an industry where a single mistake doesn't just crash a server, it can wipe out someone's life savings forever. Before CASA, he spent seven years building mobile software so secure and precise that the FDA approved it as a medical device, the first of its kind. He's an early Bitcoin adapter, a psychology and computer science graduate, father of four, a guy who literally built his own home, and a TV reality veteran. Paul, welcome to The Crypto Podcast.

**Paul Brower** (1:11)
Thank you, Roy. Thank you so much for having me on.

**Roy Coughlan** (1:14)
Yeah, no problem. I mean, there's a few things there that grab our attention.
The TV veteran, you have to tell us about that.

**Paul Brower** (1:23)
Sure. Yeah.
It was 2009, and I was living in San Diego, California for a summer, just spending my savings and surfing and living by the beach. I just applied on a whim to a reality dating show on MTV. Just to fill out an application, I was just bored. I did it, and I went through the long interview process, talked to producers, and they ended up casting me on a show that lasted three episodes. It was a reality TV dating show.
This is 17 years ago. It's a long time ago, but it was a lot of fun. It's just one of those things, serendipity. I don't know how it ended up there. I don't know if I'd do it again, but it was a very fun experience.

**Roy Coughlan** (2:12)
You studied psychology and computer science. Most people wouldn't do them, so how did that come about?

**Paul Brower** (2:20)
Yeah, the overlap.
I like learning how things work, and I don't have a limit on learning what things fall under that subject. So figuring out how people work was just another thing that I added to. Why does my computer do this thing? How does the heating work in my house? Why do people spend the time on the things they do? Why do they care about this? Why do they react this way? It was all just, I wanted to figure out how things work. And people, the most interesting topic you could possibly have.

**Roy Coughlan** (2:54)
So the FDA approves, how did that come about? I mean, you were doing software development for years.

**Paul Brower** (3:01)
Yes. Yeah. It was a project. We worked as a consultant.
It's just a very quick how it works. It's for pill adherence. So when you take a pill, it has this little potato battery in it. And so when it goes into your stomach, the stomach acid activates it and it sends a radio signal through your skin to a patch that you wear, through the nervous system. And then that transmits to a Bluetooth radio that talks to your mobile phone. And that would talk to a server and that would register you to pill and that would help you track your biomarkers, kind of like people wear Fitbits and stuff today. This was a much more intense, more regulated way of understanding of whether people take their medication and it's for people who struggle to take their medication, forget to, or, you know, get in a different mind where they decide not to do it and it helps them and care providers understand that. And that was a very interesting project. It's one of the first times I had built software where if you don't get it right, people can get hurt or die.
So it was a stressful time, but it was a very rewarding time. And it challenged me a lot to really think about how secure, how good, how solid my software skills are, how to build a process where you're very confident of the code that you're building. And so that was a wonderful experience for me.

**Roy Coughlan** (4:27)
Like as you say that, like kind of the battery, let's say, like how come that's not having an effect? Because you'd hear of like, say, when a child swallows a battery, how the damage that it does. Obviously, it's a different type of battery.

**Paul Brower** (4:41)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really, it's a little transistor. So the pill, it's tiny.
And so you have like a just a little antenna really. And then your, your stomach is the actual battery. So your acid in your stomach, just like you would stick in, it's like a potato. You stick little leads and potatoes and light up a light bulb. It's kind of the same thing. The same as acidity in your stomach and the electrical connection, the circuit get completed. And then the transistor would transmit that, or that trans, that little radio transmitter would activate and talk to your nervous system. So you can, you know, your nervous system is a very rudimentary electrical circuit. So you can talk to the different parts of your body and that's how your body does it. So you can talk to a little patch on your skin. It wasn't harmful or anything like that. You know, it's, it's teeny, teeny tiny. It looks like an aspirin.