The signal is here.
This is Blood Channel Radio.
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the lightning-laced airwaves.
This is episode 151 of Plep Chain Radio, and it promises to be a fun one.
Ryan Cooper from the Bitcoin Ranch joins me,
and I plan to talk to him about homesteading the Denim Road, whatever that is, and much, much more.
If you are hearing my voice right now on Spotify or Apple, thank you for being here.
But understand this, you are tuned into the legacy feed.
It works, but it's a monologue.
It's a one-way street.
Over here on Fountain and Noster, we're building a two-way radio.
This is a Valley for Valley broadcast.
There are no corporate ads here because the producers of the show, that's you, keep the frequency clear.
If you're ready to upgrade your experience, earn stats while you listen and actually have a say in the direction of the show,
then come join The Real Signal over on the V4V side.
Now, let's set the stage for the final word.
I had a conversation with a guest recently who told me,
Avi, I wanted to boost, but I agreed with everything you said, so I didn't feel like I had anything to add.
And I realized I've been framing this final word segment, this dissenting sats segment, all wrong.
I've been asking exclusively for dissent, but the role of an executive producer isn't just to argue, it's to govern.
So the final word slot is open for next week
And the mandate is simple
Ratify or rectify
In a moment, I'm going to get into the sermon
If I'm right, if you think I'm right
Boost in and ratify the argument
Give me an example from your own life that proves the point
And if I'm wrong, boost in and rectify the record
The board of directors is now in session
The top boost takes the chair
And now for our sermon
Civilization hallucinates itself into existence through contact
We look at a map and see static geometry
Highways, shipping lanes, fiber optic cables
But these are just the scars left behind by desire
The real infrastructure is biological
It's a nervous system
A pulse that jumps from one stranger's hand to another
Ignoring the borders drawn by dead men
When that pulse fails
The world contracts into senility
The memory of the horizon fades
Villages turn inward
Staring at their own feet
Forgetting the taste of spices from the next valley over
Silence between cities grows thick enough
to suffocate them. Isolation feeds atrophy. It rots the muscle of culture until the limb
falls off. But we are watching a resurrection. Walk into a Bitcoin meetup tonight.
You are witnessing the embryonic stage of a caravan. The barroom facade barely conceals
a Silk Road outpost. The beer serves only as lubricant. The signal is the commerce.
History proves that culture is a stowaway on a merchant ship.
The Renaissance exploded from the ledger books of Florentine bankers who needed better math to count their gold.
The art, the philosophy, the beauty, it all bloomed in the exhaust fumes of trade.
The Medici bankrolled the future specifically to solvate the friction of value.
We're doing the same.
Every lightning invoice is a synapse firing
Every handshake is a treaty
We're knitting the severed nerve endings of the world back together
One Bitcoin meetup at a time
Bureaucrats wait for permits to pour asphalt
We simply walk
We walk until the grass dies under our boots
And the path forces the world to acknowledge its existence
The map follows the territory
The walker dictates the geography.
And speaking of Silk Roads, or rather, as my last guest called it, Denim Roads,
joining me is a man who might know a thing or two about the topic.
Ryan Cooper, welcome to Plep Chain Radio.
Thanks, Avi. Really excited to be here, brother.
Absolutely, Ryan.
So I think your name came up both directly and indirectly on a couple of podcasts.
My good friend, who I believe is our common friend, Tom Tabor, was on the show about a month ago.
And he'd mentioned, I don't think he mentioned you by name, but he mentioned you as a person that he'd been working with in the Midwest.
I'm not going to disclose the location unless you want to.
We can get into that.
with someone he'd come across in the Midwest.
And, you know, part of Tom's journey
of getting into the Beef Initiative.
And then Augie, my guest from last week,
had suggested, in fact,
he was the one who helped me connect the dots
that the person Tom was talking about was you.
And he was the one who put us in contact.
So excited for this conversation myself,
learning more about you, what you do,
the denim road as Augie referred to it when he was here last week uh but Ryan for folks who are
not familiar with you and your work why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you
found yourself in the Bitcoin world and and and now the Noster world yeah yeah thanks man um and
Yeah, Tom is a dear friend.
Augie is as well.
I grew up in Michigan, in Detroit, until I was about 10.
And we moved outside of the city.
And I got my first taste of country life.
And we were living in a rural agricultural community.
And so my old farmer neighbors taught me how to fix a tractor and weld.
and I just got my feet wet with farm life.
My mom's been a rebel or a sovereign, you might say, for a long time.
She homeschooled me and my 11 siblings.
11?
Yeah, 11.
That's a whole school right there.
Yeah, she did it for real back when it was gangster in the 90s.
she homeschooled us and, um, and wanted to live cleanly. Like I said, we moved out of Detroit when
I was about 10. So that turned into a garden and then a milk cow. And, um, and so, yeah, I, I, I got
between 10 and, and, uh, my teen years, I got some, um, some dirty work, uh, under my feet,
Now I live in Southeast Missouri. Farmington, Missouri is where we're at, actually, about an hour and a half south of St. Louis. Similar environment, very rural agricultural area. Our town is called Farming Town.
I was managing a Chevy dealership towards the beginning of the pandemic.
And I really didn't have anything to do with this ag side of my life anymore.
I had traded all of that for a more fiat fast life.
My wife and I had a couple kids.
She's from Finland, so we traveled back and forth to Finland quite a bit.
When the pandemic struck, it just uprooted our whole lives.
And I became really aware that we didn't have a food supply that I could rely on other than Walmart.
And so I just started looking for farmers that would sell us food.
Like I said, I live in a small town called Farmington.
You'd think it'd be easy to do.
But any of us that walk down this path realize very quickly just because people farm around you doesn't mean they grow food.
So we ended up finding a small dairy farm about an hour away from us.
And so we started driving twice a week, I and some close friends of mine, and we'd get milk and we'd bring it back and distribute it to our friends and our family.
And that was kind of the beginning of our, what we called the milk route and a lot of our farming endeavors.
I ended up quitting that fiat job.
I just couldn't take it anymore.
Um, you know, I, I, I felt like I was on the, the blunt edge of, um, of, uh, tough finance,
you know, you just, uh, I'm training sales guys every day to like maximize profit on grandma
and her car deal.
So anyway, I, I got fed up and I had to get out.
So I quit and thought, you know, I'll start like a farm services business.
I don't have a whole lot of land myself.
My family wasn't steeped in agriculture at the time.
And I just wanted to find some farmers and try to help them out.
The farm that we'd been working with an hour away, her name was Penny.
And she was milking four or five cows on her own.
Her dad and her husband had both died in a fire some years before.
So she was on real hard times.
so real quickly i realized you know there's there's uh people out here who who want to do things
the right way they want to raise food but it's not easy it's not easy to find customers not
easy to find market access and so so i and some uh some friends around here we just started trying
to try to fill that need however we could and um uh we started uh working cattle uh i learned how
of castrate calves. You know, we drive tractors during hay season for farmers that need it.
A lot of the farmers around us specifically, but this is the same all over the world,
you know, they're getting older, they're aging out. Typically, they don't have kids that want
to help or want anything to do with the farm. And so, you know, you might have a farmer with
200 acres of pasture, and he's not got any cows out there because he can't afford to work them
twice a year. So we started to try to fill that need. And that's where we got plugged in with the
Beef Initiative. I contacted Texas Slim real early on when I heard Adam Curry talking about him.
I actually went down to Texas, met him, brought him up here to Missouri to help us start our own
local beef initiative. And a lot of that over the past four or five years has kind of turned into
this Bitcoin ranch theory that we're trying to build locally.
What a story, Ryan.
And it sounds like your mom really was the hero in some sense,
the early hero of all of this.
And you've kind of gravitated back to that.
So let's talk about Bitcoin Ranch.
What is the idea there?
What exactly is a Bitcoin Ranch?
Yeah.
So my best friend, Jake, he lives here in Farmington with me.
And, you know, we both have kids.
We both have busy lives.
And both of us would like to be able to feed our kids something other than crickets in the future.
And, you know, you go out and you start trying to find real food.
And, you know, you can find some snack sticks or some chips somewhere.
And sometimes, if you're lucky, even some raw milk.
But it's difficult to put a table together.
It's not easy.
and it's getting harder and harder.
Farms are going under every year.
So just from our perspective, some years ago,
we were looking at it like, man, we want to be consumers,
but we can't even find the producers.
And so to become the best consumers we could,
we started trying to seek out these producers,
really started to try to encourage them.
we started what we call a homesteader breakfast.
We had it every Saturday at a local church in town.
And we just tried to gather local producers
and entrepreneurs and farmers and homesteaders
and people who were interested in real food.
You know, obviously Bitcoiners
and just have conversations around like hey what can we do so that next year we have more access rather than less And we been running that breakfast for four years now
It's gone through a couple different iterations, and we actually host it out here on the ranch that I live on now that we call Bitcoin Ranch Headquarters.
We've got a cafe built out, and we have Bitcoiners travel from all over the world to come have breakfast now and then.
So it's pretty special.
So Bitcoin Ranch was really the evolution of what we early on called our St. Francis County Beef Initiative, which is where we live.
And we just wanted to take initiative around our food.
And as we pumped that signal out, you know, I think sometimes as Bitcoiners, you know, we're rebels.
It's easy to kind of hide and be quiet and try to find our little group.
But I live in a town with 18,000 people.
It's pretty small here.
It's not too hard to be loud.
And so we were.
We've been loud for the past couple of years, and we found a lot of friends.
We found a lot of farmers that do want to start maybe thinking about farming the way great-grandpa did.
And we found a lot of people who are willing to pay $25 for a pasture-raised chicken instead of $5 at Costco.
And so building a lot of these relationships has been the focus of what we call ourselves Bitcoin Ranch crew have worked on.
You know, our grander vision would be to get, you know, 10, 20, 50, 100 farms around my family.
You know, I got four kids and most of my 11 siblings still live around here.
And so just feeding our tribe is kind of a big deal.
And what it's evolved into is people I have found really want to do these things.
They feel very alone.
It's not easy to do if you think you're the odd one out.
But my brother has started the farm a couple years ago.
My dad has been building a farm for the past couple years.
I've got, you know, four or five local farmers that are starting to try to raise clean beef.
They want to go direct to consumer.
They don't want to start.
They don't want to be selling their beef at the stockyards anymore.
A couple of them, you know, have taken orange pill.
So, you know, Bitcoin Ranch, I mean, I'm a visionary.
I've got some of this sketched out for the next hundred years in my community here, in our home.
but uh you know right now bitcoin ranch is kind of a decentralized farm incubator program where
we're doing everything we can to make sure we have clean water good food uh you know i think
that we probably have some things in common with uh you know establishing reliable comms with
nostr and meshtastic and we're trying to get some of those things rolled out uh to our community
here. We spend a lot of time in local politics with our mayor, county commissioner, just a lot
of relationship building. So Bitcoin Ranch makes a whole lot of sense to Bitcoiners. And it seems
kind of obnoxious and preposterous to anybody who isn't. But when I show up to a farm that's really
struggling for a volunteer day, and I have, you know, I have six, seven, eight volunteers,
of Bitcoiners who come from the area, and we tell them, hey, Bitcoin Ranch is here to help you for a day.
It really makes an impact.
And I'd like to think that in our environment here, in our community,
sometimes we are the first time somebody, you know, these old farmers have ever heard the word Bitcoin.
And so we're trying to kind of soften them up.
You know, we probably aren't going to orange pill them.
but we can maybe take off the edge of whatever this revolutionary thing is that's coming.
I love that.
So just to replay this back, Ryan,
Big Gold Ranch started as this communal table,
maybe just for your large family, which sounds amazing, by the way.
I would love to just be around such a large family.
uh so it's just this communal table where you sourced high quality food instead of
slop right fiat slop which everyone eats uh most people eat uh so it started off with that and then
you realize you could actually build out a coordination network between people and then
people started getting attracted to this to say hey how can i how can i up level my produce my uh
my farm produce my animals what have you right and now it's slowly blossoming into a net a
distribution network is that yeah is that fair yeah yeah and i would say you know distribution is
man it's a hard problem to solve you know early on in our conversations years ago uh we would sit
around and we would talk about uh you know um like automated food sheds and um uh and uh you know
the holistic Schwann's truck that we could drive around town and sell food.
It's just very difficult to do that and try to make a business out of it.
I wouldn't say we've done that effectively.
What we have done, though, is we've created enough support
to where if somebody wants to donate their time
and maybe help subsidize their own family's food consumption.
We can facilitate where to go to get food.
We can, you know, plug you in with people around you.
Some of our St. Louis guys drive down regularly.
My one in particular, Scott, he comes down once a week to do a milk route,
and we deliver milk.
I think his route's probably two or three hours long.
And that's where a lot of this idea for a denim road or a silk road across our region here,
where we could start trading more goods and more services.
A lot of it's going to be voluntary, but a lot of us are willing to do it anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
if that answers your question.
No, it does.
I would say it is a distribution network,
but the distribution network is very difficult to nail down.
What we're really focused on right now is finding producers
and finding consumers, and then most of the time,
the distribution happens by us sending that consumer out
to go shake that rancher's hand.
You know, for example, I, you know, we, we, we, um, so I have some dairy cows and we sell,
we sell raw milk. Um, we do, we do door to door delivery. So we, we'll take a jar of milk and
we'll put it on your front doorstep. And if you're a Bitcoiner in our area, uh, we have Bitcoiners
that'll bring it straight to your home. And, um, you know, we accept sats and, um, and, and hugs,
but uh but it's really expensive it's not economical the people who are usually i mean
we've got some guys who have been buying milk from us every week for years and they're uh they
they know that they're they're supporting something of value um but if the if you wanted
to actually fix the distribution problem i think that micro stores have to be involved which uh you
know the beef initiative in texas has been working on that for a little while how would that work the
concept of microstores would that be would they be spread across this belt and by the way i'm
looking at the map here uh just to orient myself with some of these places where the meshtadel and
and the denim road so if i had to draw a belt right or or like yeah i guess a belt across the
country it wouldn't be a straight line uh it wouldn't be a vertical line it would be more
diagonal, probably starting in, let's say, the width of Texas, but then it would go, it would
encompass Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, right? And sort of just go diagonally across the
country that way. Because that's where there seems to be the most activity. All this, there's stuff
happening in Pennsylvania too, but then there's Ohio in the middle. I don't know if anything's
happening in Ohio. But with all of that said, how would the microstores concept work across this
belt? Yeah. So we're actually, we're getting ready to launch our first one right now. It's been about
two years in the work, just kind of thinking how we wanted to do it. But basically, we, the way we
envision it is you buy a storage shed and, you know, these like Mennonite built storage sheds.
and you retrofit it so you can control the climate,
put some type of RFID card access on the door.
We'd actually like to get like,
because it'll be member only.
That becomes a real issue with a lot of these things
is how to circumvent the legality.
The friend I was telling about, Jake,
we've coordinated on a lot of this.
He's a lawyer, and so he navigates a lot of that for us.
So these are private member establishments.
You as a producer would rent a shelf in there, essentially, maybe some refrigerator space.
And you would market yourself in that mini store.
You would stock yourself in that mini store.
And then the consumers would have access to the store, like I said, by an RFID access.
but we would like to use Noster end pubs in the future.
Or, yeah, we've played with a couple different ideas.
But anyway, you'd get access as a consumer to the store for a monthly fee,
and you can purchase from the 30 different farms that we have stocking this facility.
That's kind of the rough idea for us.
I think there's a couple different models that Cole Bolton has played with down south.
You know, this sort of reminds me a little bit.
So I'm based in upstate New York.
I'm in the mountains here.
And it's very different from New York City, I'll tell you that.
And I'm about to talk about the honor system that some of the farms have here,
which there is no honor system in New York City, right?
But so here, so when I go to buy raw milk, I have to drive down 20 minutes to a remote farm.
I go in.
There's the shed.
I enter the shed.
There's no RFID.
It's old school.
There's a door bolt, which isn't even locked.
I go in.
I go into the refrigerator.
I pull out a couple of gallons of raw milk.
and then there's a little box for cash
where I'm putting five bucks per gallon
and then there's a register
where I'm supposed to write my name.
So obviously I do everything
except write my name in the register
and then I leave.
And it's beginning to sound a little bit like that.
It's like slightly more modern
and cypherpunk version of this.
Now, in some sense,
what I just described to you,
my experience getting raw milk
is almost a value-for-value type.
It's more on a system,
but it's also,
there is an element of value-for-value there, right?
Which is like, look, it's five bucks.
Please put the money in the box.
So for these micro stores that you're talking about,
is there going to be a shopkeeper
who's enforcing the payment
or is it a value-for-value on a system type thing?
Yeah, so no, they wouldn't,
there would be no attendant.
And I really like the situation that you have right now, and I hope that you can have that as long as possible.
And we have a lot of private farm stands around here that operate the same way.
What I'm trying to emulate, so this past year, I have some nephews in Finland, a lot of nephews in Finland, actually.
So I'm one of 12 kids.
My wife is one of 15.
So there's 27 of us between our four parents.
And so when she's the youngest and I'm the oldest, so I've just got this like massive family.
But I've got this, I've got a nephew in Finland who comes over and works with me sometimes.
And he's real sweet hearted and has a real, real, has a real passion for the farmers.
And so I told him, I said, hey, go over there and find me some regenerative type farmers, you know.
And so he's been scouring over, you know, his part of Finland.
And this year when I went to go visit him, he had a couple dairy farms wanted to visit.
And they all had different types of honor systems similar to what you just described.
But the one thing that really piqued my interest was there was this little town that had pretty much gone bankrupt and all of the shops had closed.
And so there was a young fella who decided he wanted to bring something back to his little village so people could buy groceries And so they actually started a community shop And the way I experienced
it was I drove up to this thing. It's got a locked door. It's got a phone number. I text the phone
number. It asks me to pay a euro. I pay a euro. And then now I have a code that I can put in the
door and I have access to the store. And I walk in there and it's a, you know, like a little,
you know, like a little Aldi's or something. There's no attendant. There is a self-serve
cash register and there's a camera up in the corner. And once or twice a week,
volunteers from the town, little old ladies come in, they clean the shop, they restock the shop.
And now they've got a place where they can, you know, create some inventory. And, and as a
community decide, hey, we want to invest in some, you know, we want to have soap in here, we want,
we want to, you know, bring in paper towels or whatever. That's really what I would like
to kind of bump this up to. I think the farm store out in front of the farm, you know, and you've got
an honor system is awesome. And in the perfect world, I think that's probably what we get to.
But for right now, and especially the next 20 years going through what I think we're going to
go through, we're gonna have a lot of people who are producing very valuable food. And they might
not want to welcome people to their family farm to sell that food. They're going to need
like a one-layer. We said for a long time, we call ourselves the milkman. We said we're trying
to get rid of all the middle guys. And then eventually we realized, well, we're trying to
get rid of most of the middle guys because there have to be a couple. There has to be one or two.
And so we're just trying to think of what would be the minimum infrastructure for, I'm thinking of a couple homesteads that are producing yogurt and various things.
And they want to sell it, but like I said, they're raising kids and they don't want to put their address online.
You know, it's interesting, Ryan, because, you know, you're talking about farms shutting down and Tom Tabor mentioned this as well when he was on the show.
I think it's what is it? Seven ranchers a day or something like that.
It's some absurd number like that.
Yeah, that sounds low to me.
Yeah.
But yeah, maybe more. Maybe it's 30. Right. A day just fall off the map.
So you're going to have a handful of these homesteaders, ranchers, who are producing, as you said, incredibly valuable food.
It's going to be even more valuable because there'll be the few ones who are actually able to produce it because of their regenerative practices.
And then you're going to have communities that need food.
Or they can devolve into fiat slop, right?
But there will be, I'm certain there will be more demand than supply at some point, right?
it's got to get to that point.
Yeah.
I mean, that poses a sort of a societal risk, doesn't it?
If you have children.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
It does.
I mean, it's...
I mean, if you have children, it's chilling.
You know, my oldest is 10.
My youngest is four months.
and I want to be able to feed them real food for the next 50 years,
I have no confidence that I'll be able to do so.
And if I am able to, I'm very sure that it is because
I'm working with the person growing it.
You know?
I mean, if you are still on some type of legacy social media,
like Facebook or Instagram, you see this AI slop just eating people right now. It's crazy, man.
It's crazy. And just the realization that like, oh my gosh, I will never be able to let my family
get anywhere close to this. And if they do, they will have to know that none of this is real.
None of this is real. Hey, if you want to go grab a, you know, McDouble, I'm not going to,
I'm not going to be the guy harping on you.
But don't pretend it's real food.
You know what I mean?
And so don't pretend that we're going to have access to real nutrition unless we build it.
Don't pretend we're going to have access to real money unless we build it or real communications unless we build it.
This is our game now.
Yeah.
So let's get back to the microstores, right?
I mean, maybe set aside the potentially dystopian future.
Hopefully not.
Hey, just to be clear, I'm actually, I'm super hopeful.
Yeah.
Because once you realize that, then you realize that, like, the next layer is, I have more relationships and, you know, technology and hard money.
and information than any of my ancestors have ever had in the history of humankind.
You know, we're going to do great.
We just need to do, you know, you need to, we need to like circle some wagons, find some
friends, build some community.
And, and I mean, the little house in the prairie village out on the, you know, on the frontier,
you know, we're going to outcompete them.
We're going to do fantastic.
but it's not going to be here by accident you know um so yeah sorry man i i don't mean to be
a doomer no i i actually think that things are going to go great if people are intentional
but if you think it's going to happen on its own it won't oh yeah yeah and you i mean i went there
as well right because it is it is sometimes like you just what is the worst that could happen and
then you go there and like oh crap okay let's just talk about what we can do to actually fix this
so let's talk about the the this a network or a mesh here right so you're talking about microstores
um and you have a bunch let's say that pop up in missouri uh but they do they might not have
everything that some someone local is looking for right maybe the ones in the next state do
maybe there's something in in tennessee there's a microstore in tennessee that's that sells a
special kind of meat or you know um and in my mind this is where sort of the idea of the mesh
comes in which is this these these little nodes the in in your case they'd be micro stores that
are coordinating with each other maybe it's through nostor for the for the settlement piece
and then you'll need some kind of decentralized courier service that that's able to get uh things
from A to B, right?
Is that something that you're thinking about?
Because when I heard Augie last week
talk about the denim road,
that's where my mind went,
which is these decentralized nodes,
having a coordination system,
having a way of delivering the physical goods
from one node to another.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would say,
I spent some time thinking about this
a couple years ago.
And it's not something that I focus on a lot right now.
It is something that Augie is very attentive to.
And, you know, sometimes we just have to chop the wood that's in front of us.
And in my experience, anything grander than my little neighborhood project
is going to take some technical genius that I just don't have.
And so I'm really excited to see some of these guys, Scott and Augie and Spence.
There's people working on how to get things moved across state.
I'm pretty impressed that we've had a milk rat running for three or four years now, as consistently as we have.
But it hasn't been because of me.
so
I just say that to say
Kansas City, St. Louis
Nashville, these are kind of hubs
within reach of us
and I would love to see
more
trade and commerce
and courier
back and forth
I'm
going to be riding
on that bus versus helping
drive it if that makes sense yeah but you see signs of it coming right yeah i do i do you know
i do see signs of it coming um so
maybe i'm caught a bit in the practical here um
you know i quit my i quit my job some years back to focus on this stuff full time
and I went broke really fast.
And so I realized, hey, you know, there's lots of ideas.
It's hard to get people to work together.
A really great way to get people to work together
is build a business that's productive
and you can compensate them.
And so I'm really focused on what we can do
what we can do in that space locally right now.
I have a hard time imagining us moving goods out to Colorado,
but it could happen.
I'm sorry, Avi.
I might not be like the rah-rah guy on this one.
I've just seen, I've put together a lot of routes that have fallen apart.
And you know what I expect to happen?
I expect things that the fiat world values highly to become worth less.
And, you know, proof of work things like what we're talking about right now to become worth a lot more.
and when that happens i think there's going to be a lot more human energy focused on trying to get
the stuff moved around but right now right now if you want you know you i think you just said
five dollars a gallon for for your milk you know that dairy farmer is losing his ass you know um
it's like uh you know we've all we've all known like a you know a small craft person who's who
thinks they're running a business, but then, you know, you really get into it and it's like, man,
this person just has a really sucky job that doesn't pay them very well. There's no way to
scale that, you know? And so, I mean, I think beef will become incredibly expensive in the future.
Raw milk. We sell raw milk for $20 a gallon here. What? I think raw milk, I think raw milk will
become incredibly expensive in the future. I tell my wife, like, you know, ground beef will be caviar
before this is done.
So once that happens, you know,
I think there'll be a lot of incentives
for people to figure out how to grow this food,
how to get this food, and how to distribute this food.
You know, you're familiar with CrowdHealth?
Yeah.
CrowdHealth, I just saw a post by them today.
They give away a quarter of a cow once a year.
and uh they uh the guy who supplies that cow is jake steaks and i know jake i just saw that he
posted i was like oh man that's awesome because i know jake from years ago jake started buying
grass-finished beef for him and his family and realized it was super expensive so he started
subsidizing that by buying a little bit more and selling it piecemeal to his you know to friends
and then it grew and grew and grew and all of a sudden you know i'm i'm talking with jake and
And he's like, hey, I've got two beef in the back of my van.
I'm driving to California to go drop it off at some military base somewhere, you know.
And so all of a sudden, you know, this guy kind of gets activated.
But at the same time that he's out there distributing beef, my mom called me and she wanted to buy a cow.
And she said, you know, how much is like, you know, I want something, I want clean beef, I want it to be grass fed, and I don't want to have any shots.
And I don't remember what price I gave her, because this was some years ago, but she freaked out because she remembered paying $1,200 for a cow in the freezer at some point a decade or two ago.
And I believe if you have Jake Stakes bring you a cow or I tell you if you have me bring you a cow it going to be over four grand you know and maybe five So like I guess what I trying to communicate here is the incentives are such that every dairy farmer that exists right now
will go out of business. And unless new dairy farmers start up, we won't have any dairy farmers.
I mean, I know every dairy farmer, you know, in a fifth, you know, in some type of radius of me.
and I know that every single one of them will be done in the next five to ten years
because they're getting old and at some point they're not going to be able to do it for another winter.
And I don't know anybody who's starting to milk cows.
I actually, and that's not true, I know two homesteading families that left the city
and started homesteads to milk cows and sold their cows after three years because it's hard.
You milk cows twice a day, seven days a week, forever.
so a lot of this stuff is like hey in the future it's not going to be that way but people are going
to pay a ton of money for their food and there will be some people out there who are willing to
grow it and distribute it and figure it out i don't see it happening around me right now so i'm
frantically trying to get my brother to raise sheep my neighbor to raise beef and and we're
having a lot of success but i'm constantly over here in the corner just saying like hey guys
i know it's hard right now being a beef farmer is going to be very productive and very fruitful
in the future you know and um yeah who can afford those numbers though right i mean 20 bucks for
gallon i wouldn't have raw milk if i had to pay 20 bucks a gallon yeah yeah yeah well okay let me
Let me reframe it a little bit.
It's $10 a gallon if you go buy it from local farms around us.
We deliver it to people's house for $20 a gallon.
So, you know, we sell it for $10 a jar.
You know, I mean, hamburgers, $10 a pound, you know.
I got one farmer, Justin Arnett.
He's a third, fourth generation cattle farmer.
Real sweet brother to me.
and he's a Bitcoiner now.
And I spent a lot of time telling him,
hey, people want clean beef.
They don't want these black cows raised up like this.
I've got customers that are willing to pay for unvaccinated beef.
And so he pivoted his herd.
And over the past three years, he's done a full pivot.
But man, it is very expensive to raise cows like that.
And, you know, if you want people to raise cows like that for your family, you're going to have to pay for it, you know?
And, I mean, I pay, personally, I pay a lot more, you know, I pay probably $10 a gallon for milk.
I think my family, there's six of us, we go through four gallons of milk a week.
So what is that?
You know, we have a $40 milk bill every week.
$160 a month.
I mean, a lot of people would think that's nuts because they're buying 2% at the store for whatever it is, $2 or $3 a gallon, $4 a gallon, maybe $5 a gallon.
But I just think about food differently, I guess.
Man, I'm sorry.
You get me on a roll.
I'm just going to keep crambling here.
I think about this stuff 24-7, $3 or $6, $5 a year.
I don't know, Avi, who's going to be able to afford food.
But I can tell you most farmers, most farmers, just like most small businesses that aren't going to be in business five, ten years down the road,
most small farms have no idea where their profit line is, whether they have one or not.
Yeah.
And how does Bitcoin factor into all of this?
I know there's, you got in through the Beef Initiative and people can, in theory anyway, buy and sell.
When you have these micro stores set up, buy and sell these goods and services with Bitcoin.
Maybe something like you were talking about NOSTA, the RFID, maybe ZAP to unlock or something like that, right?
But beyond that, like where does Bitcoin fit into all of this?
yeah well um bitcoin uh in my specific story uh you know i i had you know i was familiar with
bitcoin um you know like a lot of people have that story i heard about it here and there
it was it was right uh i think in 2020 when i when i really started watching bitcoin started
learning about Bitcoin and crypto in general. And, uh, and when the, when, when they announced
the first stimulus checks, I'll never forget the national, the United States national used car
report, um, jumped 30% in an hour and a half, uh, when they, when they announced, uh, uh, stimulus
checks to the people. And so I just, I just, uh, I realized, okay, like this, this game is just
going to crush us poors, you know? Um, so that was my, my real orange pill. I realized like,
this is, this is something to, uh, solely focus on. Crypto is a scam. The, um, you know,
the fiat world is going to eat, eat us all. Uh, we need, we need an escape.
The way Bitcoin has filters, you know, affects all of this more specifically as far as our work goes, I would say, is the people.
You know, Bitcoiners gather here a couple times a month and talk and strategize about how we can help our farmers, how we can promote local food.
And then obviously, as Bitcoiners, we all trade. We use sats as our exchange. Are you asking how Bitcoin is going to affect local rural agriculture?
agriculture? No, I mean, just it was more about, you know, how is it being used in commerce here?
And I think you answered it, right? Which is, I mean, you trade sats. You trade your goods and
services for sats. Yeah. Yeah. So Ryan, you'd mentioned something to me about liberty fencing.
You want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. So that would actually probably be
where Bitcoin really kind of comes in.
So we started Bitcoin Ranch as an LLC some years ago,
and it was this farm services business.
So we were going out, we were charging an hourly rate for services,
and we just got obliterated.
It's very difficult to make money off of farmers when farmers aren't making money.
and um it's but it's sad you know we really wanted to help these guys so there was kind of a core
group of us bitcoiners and we sat around and uh we were we were just discussing you know what we
can do how we can go about this and we realized um that we needed to start a business uh uh a
business that could make some money that we could stack some sats and the you know it would be great
if that business complemented our farm services.
So we ended up settling on fencing, Liberty Fencing.
So Scott Parsons and I, we shook hands and we started this business together.
And the idea was that we'd start a Bitcoin-based small services company on a Bitcoin standard.
and we'd use AI and new technologies.
We'd leverage as much as we could
and try to build a fencing crew
that could one day fence our own farms.
And so anyway,
so we've been doing that for about two years now
and the way the attention split happened,
I focus 80% of my energy on Liberty Fencing,
and Scott focuses on the co-op and food distribution.
And it's been a hard go, you know, starting a business.
But this year, we're doing great.
We've got a good crew working.
They're working right now up in St. Louis.
I rushed down here, abandoned them, to come record with you.
And we pay our guys in Bitcoin. We offer 5% discount if people want to pay us in Bitcoin. We don't get paid a whole lot in Bitcoin. Our logo is like a giant orange sun coming up over our fences. And yeah, so that's my job now, building high quality residential fences for anybody who will pay us to build fences.
well i mean you know you have farms you'll need fences right it's uh i think the
a bit of a circular economy in some sense um well yeah and you know my so my dad is a my dad is a
a small business uh developer and coach and um and he he's he's built a couple businesses on his
own. And he is a real strong believer that the, the, the trades are going to be the only thing
that's not going to get ate by AI and robotics real soon. And I don't know, I mean, maybe,
maybe robots can install a fence or fix my plumbing, uh, here in the near future. But I
think that's probably a little ways off. Um, although I'm really excited to get one of these
robots to unload my truck. Like that's a, it's like 80% of our labor is like unloading and loading
trucks. So as soon as we can, as soon as we can get some help there, that'd be great. But I think
that small skill based businesses are probably the path for entrepreneurs and Bitcoiners in the
future if you don't want to, if you don't want to get laid by the wayside. And so Scott and I,
Scott is, is Scott's mature. He's retired. He's, he had a very full career in finance.
He's sophisticated and understands how to build a business.
So Scott and I had this idea that if you had a small business, even if it was a gutter
cleaning business, and you treasured in Bitcoin, then you're going to have a certain percentage
advantage against your neighbor competitor business that's cleaning gutters.
Let's call it 10, 20, 30% per year.
And then if you're savvy and you use AI to do your logo and marketing and give you a bit of an edge up on your marketing side,
that's going to stack on top of whatever your Bitcoin gains would be over your competitors' fiat monopoly.
And then if you do have an open mind about robotics and you are aware that, you know, there are tools that were invented this year that radically change the labor output from last year.
And I mean, this is the case in every single small business.
So for us, it's fencing.
So we don't dig holes.
We never dig holes when we build fences.
We've invested in some great tools that let us pound everything in the ground.
So we build steel fences.
Even if we build a custom wood fence, the posts are steel.
We drive them three to four feet in the ground.
And then we build our fence systems on top of and around them.
So I think those three things, like I said, if you're like a small business anywhere,
doing carpentry
and you use Bitcoin
AI and robotics
and then just have an open
mind and try to be
try to be nimble
as the trades change
over the next couple years
I don't know of anything
that would be
a better investment
of your SATs
You know, I think that's probably maybe the only way to really outperform Bitcoin is invest in yourself, build a business, build a team.
And yeah.
How, you know, with the Bitcoin savings play, right now Bitcoin is a number go down technology mode.
Yeah.
How do you handle that?
Yeah.
Well, I don't.
Scott does.
I build fences.
And that's actually, I think, also another pretty awesome cheat code.
I've always been told partnerships are the worst idea in the world,
and I would usually be very partner adverse.
But there's something about working with a Bitcoiner, you know?
And Scott and I are 50-50 partners.
We'll be partners forever.
We're building Bitcoin Ranch together.
We've got a 100-year plan.
I think finding a Bitcoiner that you can build with is a huge, huge life hack.
Scott and I just see the world differently than any other entrepreneur I ever interact with.
You know, we're completely aligned on, you know, Scott and I believe that property is probably going to become a lot cheaper in 10 to 20 years.
that we're going to be able to raise cattle on land that's kind of been thrown by the wayside
because corn and soybeans aren't subsidized in the same way.
It just, yeah, so your question, how do we handle the drawdowns?
I'm not exactly sure.
Scott handles a lot of that.
But I would say, you know, I mean, we have our savings,
and our savings in dollars right now is a lot lower.
I don't really care that much.
We obviously, you know, we have cash flow and our cash flow pays our bills.
And because we're both Bitcoiners, we're pretty debt and risk averse.
So we grow slowly.
We grow patiently.
And yeah, I mean, hard times are going to come for all businesses.
I think that we are – in thinking of like other local fencing companies, I think I'm probably the least worried.
Well, you know, look, that is one way of dealing with drawdowns is not to look at them.
They're happening.
Great.
Strike, I guess they had like a denial of service attack today.
Oh, wow.
But I opened StrikeUp and saw, I guess we're into the 60s.
I'll tell you, I'm just like, man, where can I get money today?
Where can I get some dollars?
So we're recording this episode.
It's probably when Bekhan is in the mid-60s.
It'll probably be out a couple of weeks from now.
So hopefully when the regular listeners of the podcast hear this episode,
they can have a good laugh about this oh yeah that little drawdown back then um but ryan we're
approaching the one hour mark uh so we'll we'll take a pause here for our open music
uh segment and uh we're going to keep the wheels turning for this one uh so you know a lot of music
i play on the show is about finding the signal about precision but sometimes you need a track
for the journey itself.
It feels like a bit of a wild journey.
And this track is really fitting.
This band is called The 54 Plates
and the song Lost captures that specific feeling
of driving down a highway at night,
maybe without a destination, just clearing your head.
It's got a great driving rhythm
and a melody that just floats right on top of it.
So if you're in your car as you're listening to this
and you're able to laugh off that little dip you had
two weeks back, then this is your soundtrack.
It's time to get lost.
guitar solo
It's hard but it's not so damn true
Are you lost and confused in your own present tense?
Cushion myself with the darkness
Almost comforting knowing it's there
Piecing together like moments in time
A montage of moments we share
My God, you're stripping me, babe
I've never been this last, baby
I'm so last to you
Who's under the influence tonight?
Who's down by the carnival fair
The colors we see
The emergence of dreams
And beauty is something we share
My God, you're stupid, baby
I've never been this last, baby
I'm so lost to you
I've never been this last baby
I'm so lost to you
guitar solo
That was Lost by the 54 Plates.
It's got such a great rolling energy to it.
It's not aggressive, but it's insistent.
It feels like motion. And I think there's a lesson in there for us. In the fiat world,
being lost is a terrifying thing because you're running out of time. But in our world,
the world of pioneers, sometimes getting lost is the only way to find the new edges of the map.
And you have to wander a bit to discover the good stuff. So I've got 90% split set up for the band
for this chapter.
If that track was the perfect co-pilot
for your week,
then send the 54 Plates a boost.
What do you think, Ryan?
I liked it.
I liked Beauty is Something We Share, man.
That's the truth.
Oh, yeah.
I think they're a UK-based band.
I might be getting this wrong,
but I think it's the brothers,
the Abbott brothers, Nathan Abbott,
I forget the, Nolan?
Yeah, Nolan and Nathan Abbott.
I think it's them.
Relatively new as well, if I'm not mistaken.
But yeah, good stuff.
All right, so let's talk about NOSTA for a bit here.
Where does NOSTA come into this network?
Or, you know, we talked about distribution a little bit.
we talked about maybe the maybe somewhere with the bitcoin ranch for the for these breakfast
meetups right where do you see nostril playing a role in what you do yeah i am man nostril is
something that i i just think i get really excited about uh in waves so i i uh we i spent
uh the last august in uh helsinki finland uh with a bunch of bitcoiners they're awesome over there
It's actually where I met Tom.
Tom and I had rolled around in the same circles for a long time, but it never actually met.
And I, you know, Noster and BitChat were big deals in August.
And when we came back here, I had this, I really had this vision to try to onboard like my local populace onto Noster.
And so we actually had a small Bitcoin conference in September.
And we, you know, we had some donors give us some sats for onboarding.
And so we said we were going to give $10 of Bitcoin to 100 people who would download Primal.
And you know I don think we got to 100 I would love to get more people onto Noster locally
Locally is what I care about a lot.
I was just talking to my wife about this the other day.
And she's, my wife's, she's awesome.
She isn't on any social media.
Really, really hates technology.
My poor kids, my poor kids are, they're allowed like a day of screen, you know,
a screen time once a week and uh my 10 year old is allowed to play a little minecraft but
i was talking to her about nostr and uh and and just how how different it feels to get off of
twitter or facebook um and spend a little time on nostr it's more fulfilling you don't feel like
an algorithm's got your got your throat um i'm not sure how to drive adoption we keep i keep
taking swings at it and it's one of those things it's similar to bitcoin until you're on fire and
you need it you realize how bad it is around you uh you might not be ready to take that jump
but one thing that has me really excited right now is uh my local f3 group you maybe you saw this
getting chatted about in a in a thread the other day um f3 nation i don't know if you've ever heard
this. It's a, uh, it's a men's only, uh, workout club or group, um, that, uh, and, uh, they,
they, they work out outside rain or shine, hot or cold early in the morning. And it's all,
it's all over the world. Uh, you can find these, you know, you can look up F three nation and find
one near you, but something special happened here in our town. Usually these, uh, these places,
they'll have like maybe four or five guys who get together and work out.
They're supposed to max out at like eight or 10.
Here in my small town, we have 50.
So every morning of the week, if you get up and you drive,
you get up and get in your car at about 4.30 in the morning,
there's a shocking number of guys on the road
heading to three different locations where we meet
and we have a 35-minute workout led by somebody in our peer group,
and then we drink coffee afterwards and we fellowship.
And so when this thing got started here this past year,
I don't know what's in the water around us, but it just exploded.
A lot of high-intentioned men wanted to get involved.
And so now my brothers go, my dad goes, my best friends go.
We got maybe six or seven Bitcoiners who go.
And we slowly started to realize this might be an awesome opportunity to roll out something like Meshstastic and Noster.
So it's actually, that was the conversation I was alluding to.
I thought maybe that you had witnessed.
I had plugged in with some of the Bitcoin veterans guys and just said, hey, and ironically, they're also an F3.
On the other side of the country.
So, you know, we all have our, we all have nicknames.
I'm Fence Post.
I was talking to Doge.
And Doge, one of the Bitcoin veterans, he said, hey, I'd love to help.
Let me send you guys a care package.
So we're actually, we're going to try to deploy some type of Mesh-tastic system across our county at five different locations.
And my hope is with this specific set of guys, you know, people who are kind of preppers already, you know, they're already thinking about, you know, what they need to do to take care of their families.
And they're concerned about food and water and clean air.
My hope is we can really scale something there.
But if that was successful, I'd have to say it'd be the first real successful swipe I've had at getting people to adopt what I think is life-saving technology.
It's part of the problem of being a Bitcoiner.
Yeah.
Mesh-tastic or Noster on Mesh-tastic would be fantastic.
But I want to go back to something you said earlier, right?
By just doing the work, right?
Let's, you know, heads down.
If you, you know, it's not about doomerism.
It's about if you have a way of fixing things, just put your head down and do it.
Right.
So you're doing that.
You know, I'm doing what I do.
And I think one way of getting people to use Noster is just make the work so compelling.
Right.
And then when people wanted to say, well, yeah, if you want to, if you want to experience my work, whether it's you through.
through the work you're doing through this through regenerative agriculture through
homesteading whatever products and distribution channels you're setting up well the only way to
get to me is through Noster and in my case whatever content whatever art I'm creating
if you want to access one access to any of this stuff you got to come to Noster man and I think
if more and more people do that those two things one focus on their craft right and just making
the world a better place just through whatever they're good at right whatever they their their
their reason for being on this planet right their purpose just focus on that do incredible things
and then and then make it so compelling and then turn around and tell anyone who's who asks yeah
yep gotta come to noster find me yeah no it's a great it's a great point you know and i
it makes me think, you know, I think like the first commandment God gave humans was be fruitful.
We usually say be fruitful and multiply. But I think the first one was be fruitful.
And it's something my dad says all the time. It's just, I want to be productive and fruitful.
And I think so many people's life energy is soaked up by whatever their fiat job is or
by whatever, you know, clown world has their attention soaked up with that day.
You know, these Epstein files probably be a pretty good place to dump a lot of wasted time and energy right now.
And they don't get a chance to be productive and fruitful, you know.
And I think about this a lot because I know the popular narrative is, you know,
when if, if we had a really bad situation, things go down like Mad Max. I just don't think it's the
case. I think the moment things got real, um, and, and we had to figure some stuff out, I think I
would have, I would be surrounded by men whose time and energy isn't being soaked up by clown
world anymore. And we'll, we'll fix it. We'll figure it out. You know, we'll be fruitful. We'll
be productive. And maybe that's, maybe that's the way I should go. Maybe I need to go, uh, and,
and go a hundred percent Noster. It's been difficult in this area because we're, uh, I
specifically am pretty politically, uh, engaged. I've ran for office as a libertarian a couple of
times for various things. And, um, you know, you kind of have to be out there and try to meet the
people where they are. But frankly, man, it's getting to be such garbage. I mean, I can't even
open Facebook without just feeling just sad and dark inside.
These people are going to lose everything, you know?
Yeah.
So I'll let you.
Maybe Noster's the way.
So I'll let you and the folks on the live stream in on a little secret.
I was going to talk about this in a couple of weeks,
but that's when the episode's going to land anyway.
so on X
if you go to my X you'll see
there's been a bunch of posts in the last week
from my account talking
about different things that's not me anymore
man that is not me anymore
I've trained an open claw
and it's put it to work
and it's doing its thing
and I think that's exactly what that
platform deserves it's a platform that's
devolved into AI slop
it will get the AI slop version of me
hmm i like that a lot i like that a lot i i saw i think i think jeff booth has done something
similar and yes it was inspired by it's really prodding yeah it's really prodding prodding me
man i i um you know uh a bit of a rabbit trail but something that um something that texas slim
Have you ever talked to Tex?
I've not, no.
Something Texas Slim told me really early on.
I was filled with a lot of angst.
I was still working this fiat job, you know, trading 70 hours of my week for paper printed by people who hated me.
And Slim was here at the ranch, and he just kept saying, hey, you need to stop asking permission.
You need to stop asking permission.
You need to go do.
And Slim talks in rhymes and riddles a lot. But that has really opened itself up. That wisdom has opened itself up to me over the past two years. Just stop asking for permission. Just go do.
I love that idea of just saying, hey, you know what?
I'm out here being productive and building.
If you want to see it, we're on Noster.
And if you interact with me anywhere else that just more AI slot you know Yeah I love what you said about stop asking for permission
So I was in a not dissimilar boat, Ryan.
And I've talked about this a few times on this podcast
and then other podcasts where I've been a guest on,
which is I was in a terrible fiat job.
I was running an AI team at a horrible fiat company,
like a large one, which I'm not going to name names.
Everyone knows it.
it's a horrible company and they hate that company and i was there i was running an ai team there
and my life was miserable uh and i was like it was for the longest time it was almost as if i
was waiting for someone to give me permission to quit yeah wait and and i joke i actually ended up
writing a play about it uh called waiting for satoshi i was waiting for satoshi to set me free
but i was like oh you know what i'm gonna quit when bitcoin is a million bucks that's the permission
I need. And then my life
got progressively miserable
at work. I said, okay, you know what? Half a million.
Then I said, okay, 250k.
And at one point, I reached a point last summer
where I said, whose permission am I
waiting for? I'm just going
to do it. Now, in today,
regarding when we are today
with a big, when I jumped,
Bitcoin was over 100k.
Now we're at 16, whatever we are.
So I'm like,
what do I do now?
But having said that,
zero regrets uh and and it all of that happened when i stopped waiting for satoshi's permission
or whoever's permission i was waiting for to quit yeah man i i just experienced this so
often lately that i i know what i need to do i don't need somebody to tell me i need to sit
quietly for a while and then just go do it you know um and it is scary and i can't say that
It's smart from a worldly point of view at all.
I never should have quit my job when I did.
But man, I just, when you feel the chains, you know, and you have an opportunity to walk
away from them, walk away, walk away.
We'll figure it out.
And, you know, I'm a Christian.
I do believe that there's a, you know, a divine plan.
And I think that, you know, God takes care of every sparrow, every bird.
And if you are not trading your life, literally trading your life minute by minute for those chains, I think that you will find fulfillment.
You know, and that's not to say, by the way, that it has not been a hard couple of years.
I mean, I've been down to the wire a couple times and, you know, gotten the bill notices in the mail.
um just there's almost it's almost a process for me it's almost been a process of like
i know that all whatever whatever money i had stacked prior was ill gotten and i just don't
think satoshi and god were going to let me take any of that into the new world you know i i had
to get all the way down and uh and then start stacking stacking in an ethical way yeah now's
the time to double down man now is not the time to walk away and maybe i'm saying that more more
to myself than to you right but now is not the time to walk away um no so let's before we we close
out right let's uh go back and close the loop first on the denim road i don't think we fully
defined the denim road so for our audience right like we've talked about this sort of nebulous
notion of a mesh network, a human mesh network of nodes and whatnot. But really, like in simple
terms, what is the Denim Road? Yeah. Well, I can tell you right now, I'll tell you a small part of
the Denim Road is the Milkman Cooperative. And the Milkman is, you know, the St. Louis region's
distribution route for local food. And it's all word of mouth. We've tried to automate it. We've
tried to put it on Noster. We've tried to build a website. We've done a lot of different things.
It's really hard to get away from shaking each other's hands, asking you, hey, do you have some
eggs? No. Do you have any quail eggs? You know, I mean, you got to just kind of get through this
nitty-grittiness. And so we have kind of a local milk route that runs, you know, probably
60, 70 miles. And Augie and the KC crew has been working on this idea to really boost that up to
the next level. I know they do a lot of food distribution on their side of the state. We
aren't familiar with Missouri, Kansas City is on one side, St. Louis is on the other. We're about
five hours apart. And so the idea of having regular couriers that are attending meetups
across the state and able to move goods in somewhat of an anonymous way is really what
Augie's focused on. And I love the idea. I just, I'm a technically retarded person,
and I can't quite help with like the, you know, building out the platform side of that.
but when it comes to finding the people and finding the products to move around,
we have no shortage of it.
And in the past couple of years, I have seen,
so one thing that I left out was when I had quit my job,
my wife and I were living in an apartment,
and I had told her, hey, we need to get out.
I don't know how crazy this pandemic is going to get,
but we need to get onto a farm.
and uh two or three weeks later i got introduced to this very wealthy local businessman who had
this hay farm operation and it had an empty house sitting on it he was looking for a farm manager
so my wife and i moved out here so i actually live on this beautiful horse ranch and we we
operate as a hay farm we cut about a thousand acres of hay and my hay customers wouldn't you know
are all people fleeing the city trying to start little homesteads down here in the rural country.
And so I've just seen over the past three or four years so many homesteads and farms start up.
I'm like, I'm drowning in food and resources down here.
I think that if we can expand this distribution from St. Louis to Kansas City and then maybe reach out to Denver and then reach the other direction to Nashville and Augie has been working with the Bitcoiners in Michigan.
I think we're going to need it
I think we're going to need a way to communicate
and trade outside of our
little locale
I'm just
right now we're all doing it as a hobby
and hopefully we get it figured out before we need to do it out of necessity
That time is not that far away
well hopefully well i mean no i don't think it is you know and um and and thankfully it's a lot of
fun you know i mean i i uh i i love finding farms and homesteads and uh spending time with people
who want to do things better whether it's here or in finland you know the beef initiative is working
in you know thailand and australia and south africa now i i uh i think that sometimes we do
feel probably a little bit lost. But when you zoom out and you take stock of, I mean, I don't know,
Avi, how long you've been seeking out raw milk, but at some point in the past, you didn't have
raw milk and now you do. And you can start stacking that. And eventually, you know, like I'm in like
a super blessed situation.
Like I told you,
I don't feel dystopian.
I feel very hopeful
because every night
when I sit down and eat,
I know where everything comes from.
But it's taken some years
to get there, you know?
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, look,
there is lots to look forward to, right?
There's so many people like you,
like Augie,
like I had a couple of weeks back,
I had this guy who's building
an Uber and Lyft replacement,
Drivester and Rydester.
on NOSTA, right?
It's like there are people here on NOSTA especially, right?
They're bringing the cypherpunk values back.
They're actually building.
They're not just talking.
So there is a parallel system that we're building
and lots to look forward to.
Yeah, and so proud to be a part of it, man.
I mean, yesterday I was sitting in an, you know,
I was sitting talking to some friends of mine.
they're boomers and they just felt so hopeless. They're scared. They, this Epstein stuff is really
shaking them. You know, I mean, they're just like, is the world falling apart? And I'm like sitting
there with a smile on my face, like, yeah, heck yeah. And my friends are building a new one.
And I've been telling you, we've been building a new one for years. And, and, uh, and now I just
saw my buddy Jake steaks delivering beef for crowd help My friends building insurance company You know a guy building an Uber replacement I tell you one more story before you kick me off here
I had been suffering.
I've spent so much time and energy worrying about where my family would get food over the past years.
that this past year, 2025,
I was going to visit my wife's family in Finland.
And I was going to chip in
and try to help out with the first Nordic Bitcoin conference
while I was there.
And on my flight over,
I was like, my kids were sleeping.
I had this guilt sitting in my gut
because I realized back home in Farmington, Missouri,
no matter what happens,
we're going to do fantastic.
We've got food.
We've got water.
If tomorrow morning the electricity was off, I would go to work out with my boys and there'd be 50 of us just automatically showing up at the same place every morning.
You know, like, okay, what are we going to do?
You know, we just got hit with all this snow recently.
Dude, I've got such a network here.
I'm good.
But here I am on a plane flying halfway around the world, you know, to the border of Russia.
and I've got more family over there than I have here.
And I'm thinking, how am I going to feed them?
You know, like if something goes down and I'm over here,
how am I going to make sure that my kids don't eat the crickets, you know?
And so I just started to have this like, okay, all right, deep breath.
We got to do this all over again.
Let's go, you know.
And I get off the plane in Helsinki.
And again, I'm going to refer to my faith because I have this.
this, this was like a big moment for me where I, I, I get off the plane there and I start
looking at farms and visiting little stores and me and my nephew are driving around.
And, um, I, I drive to, I end up in Helsinki at the Bitcoin meetup. And, uh, I'm talking to one
of the guys organizing the, the, um, the conference and he off, he pulls out a bag of,
of beef bits, Bitcoin beef bits. And he goes, Hey, I've got this product we want to try.
Um, I got this butcher in town and I just, two weeks ago, I walked in with an S 19 and I asked
him, Hey, can you make jerky out of this? And my Bitcoin friends will go nuts over it. And the guy's
like, hold my beer. And so they make this product. It was, I try it, you know, it's like, you know,
it's an early product. It's probably a little overly crunchy, but it's cool. You know, I meet
this butcher at the conference. And this guy is our brother, Avi. I mean, this guy, God has had
him over there working on building a food supply for the past 10 years. In 2011, this guy started
on the venture that I felt God put me on just a couple of years ago. And he's got a store in
Helsinki and it has fresh milk and it has pastured eggs and it has good beef. It has all of this
stuff, you know? And he's telling me this and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is only 40 minutes away
from where my wife grew up. You know, like, look at, I had so much stress and concern about what
was going to happen. And this has just been taken care of, man. Like all the work I put in back in
Farmington and we're not even close to what this guy has here in Helsinki. Amazing. And he's a
And I tell him, and he's a Bitcoiner.
Well, no, he wasn't a Bitcoiner.
He, you know, a Bitcoiner, my buddy, brought that S19 in and he was like, okay, he made
the product, Bitcoin Beef Bits.
And then they brought him to the conference and he told the butcher, he told me, he goes,
I came here to this Bitcoin conference and I realized all of my customers are Bitcoiners.
like all of his normal customers looking for based food were Bitcoiners.
And he's seen with this Bitcoin conference.
So now he's a Bitcoiner.
So he and I are like,
we're talking and I'm sharing with him like this,
what I just shared with you that like,
Hey,
I feel like you were an answer to my prayer,
you know?
And I said,
I would love to get my family from Kierkegaardome and bring them here sometime.
And he goes,
Kierkegaardome,
that's where I live.
I said,
what?
He goes, yeah, what's your wife's last name?
He ended up having gone to school with my wife's brothers.
No way.
He knew my family, bro.
I'm getting chills right now telling you this.
His farm was right around the corner from where my wife grew up.
Oh, my God.
Divine synchronicities, man.
Synchronicity, man.
Amen.
Amazing.
So we're going to be all right.
All my friends are building a brand new world, bro.
Praise God.
That is true.
That is true. All right. Right. So any last words, any, you know, any last thoughts? Where can, if someone wants to have breakfast with you, like, oh, my God, this is an amazing story. I want to go down to Missouri. I want to go to Bacon Ranch and I want to have breakfast with this tribe. First of all, will you shoot them if they try to show up? If not, then how can they do it?
no no uh we we won't shoot you we'd love to have you um we uh and uh yeah uh i i hate to
well i'm on i'm on nostr um maybe i can throw my end pub uh in in in the notes here yeah um
and i'm also on twitter i mean those are those are the two places if i ryan cooper 116 so ryan
Cooper116 is me on Twitter.
And yeah, we would love to connect with more Bitcoiners.
We're planning to do a, so we do a small Bitcoin conference here once a year,
a small homesteading conference here once a year.
And May 1st, we're actually going to do our first communications conference.
My dad, I told you he started this farm.
He's been working on it for the past couple of years,
and he just bought, it's 150 acre regenerative farm.
Everything you can imagine that would be regenerative
is out there.
And he just bought the golf course that's right next to it.
So now it's going to be somehow a regenerative farming
golf course.
But that's where we're going to have it.
May 1st, Farmington, Missouri, Cherrywood Golf Course
and Farm.
We're going to have a comms conference.
And we'd like to launch a lot of this NOSTA and MeshStastic type theory in this area from that.
Love it.
Yeah, probably find me on Twitter, RyanCooper116.
Awesome.
I'll put your NOSTA link and your Twitter link in the show notes.
What about Nakamoto?
You're not involved in that, are you?
No, no, I'm not.
You're talking about the Kansas City plan for next October.
Yeah.
Super excited about that.
And we'll definitely be out there.
The Bitcoin Ranch will have a heavy presence.
We'll make sure to come over.
Yeah.
Anytime people want to visit America, you should come to Missouri.
Missouri is one of the best kept secrets of this country.
We say it's the new Texas.
And I'm ashamed to say, Ryan, I've never been.
Either to Kansas City or to Farmington or to St. Louis.
to the beautiful state of Missouri.
I have not been, and I need to rectify that.
Yeah, it's shockingly beautiful.
I'm telling you, it's a secret, the best-kept secret.
Come visit Bitcoin Ranch. We'd love to have you, Avi.
Awesome. That is a plan.
I will plan to be there with my family.
All right. Well, Ryan, thank you for educating me and the audience
on all this amazing stuff that you're doing.
It's really exciting to think of where this is going to be a year from now, right?
If you and everyone else who are so committed to bringing this vision to life continues,
and no reason why you won't.
So, yeah, great stuff.
Thank you, Ryan.
And thank you to our live stream audience for listening.
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