So the original logo goes back to 08 which is the same logo without the lightning. I founded my podcast in 08 and had a designer who worked for one of the companies I owned at the time make it for me.

Since the show is the Survival Podcast listeners named him Val as in surviVAL. I also had a good friend named Val Riazanov at the time well known to my audience from Russia so that likely helped with the name.

Since then Val has actually been in two main stream TV shows. First Sherlock on CBS then recently a series called Night Sky which is an Amazon Streaming thing so we must have a fan in props or something.

Last year when I started doing some BTC dedicated shows and we nicknamed them "The Bitcoin Breakout", my web guy Tom, his wife and I set out to make a Val version that fit the BTC ethos.

We have talked about BTC on the show since 2013 but it isn't popular with the entire audience so the breakout episodes allowed me to dedicate on avg one show a week to BTC and still serve my larger audience with more homestead/survival type topics.

Laser eyes just don't work on Val well, so Lightning Val was born.