1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:18,280
The signal is here.

2
00:00:18,280 --> 00:00:22,360
This is Blood Channel Radio.

3
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:38,080
Welcome, gentle pioneers, to the lightning-laced airwaves.

4
00:00:38,380 --> 00:00:45,400
This is episode 151 of Plep Chain Radio, and it promises to be a fun one.

5
00:00:46,140 --> 00:00:49,300
Ryan Cooper from the Bitcoin Ranch joins me,

6
00:00:49,300 --> 00:00:57,180
and I plan to talk to him about homesteading the Denim Road, whatever that is, and much, much more.

7
00:00:57,180 --> 00:01:03,800
If you are hearing my voice right now on Spotify or Apple, thank you for being here.

8
00:01:04,120 --> 00:01:08,360
But understand this, you are tuned into the legacy feed.

9
00:01:08,820 --> 00:01:11,020
It works, but it's a monologue.

10
00:01:11,800 --> 00:01:13,440
It's a one-way street.

11
00:01:14,240 --> 00:01:19,280
Over here on Fountain and Noster, we're building a two-way radio.

12
00:01:20,100 --> 00:01:21,960
This is a Valley for Valley broadcast.

13
00:01:21,960 --> 00:01:29,960
There are no corporate ads here because the producers of the show, that's you, keep the frequency clear.

14
00:01:30,540 --> 00:01:38,580
If you're ready to upgrade your experience, earn stats while you listen and actually have a say in the direction of the show,

15
00:01:38,980 --> 00:01:43,760
then come join The Real Signal over on the V4V side.

16
00:01:44,540 --> 00:01:47,840
Now, let's set the stage for the final word.

17
00:01:48,440 --> 00:01:51,760
I had a conversation with a guest recently who told me,

18
00:01:51,960 --> 00:01:59,600
Avi, I wanted to boost, but I agreed with everything you said, so I didn't feel like I had anything to add.

19
00:02:00,380 --> 00:02:08,120
And I realized I've been framing this final word segment, this dissenting sats segment, all wrong.

20
00:02:08,520 --> 00:02:17,280
I've been asking exclusively for dissent, but the role of an executive producer isn't just to argue, it's to govern.

21
00:02:17,280 --> 00:02:21,100
So the final word slot is open for next week

22
00:02:21,100 --> 00:02:22,860
And the mandate is simple

23
00:02:22,860 --> 00:02:26,040
Ratify or rectify

24
00:02:26,040 --> 00:02:29,160
In a moment, I'm going to get into the sermon

25
00:02:29,160 --> 00:02:32,660
If I'm right, if you think I'm right

26
00:02:32,660 --> 00:02:35,800
Boost in and ratify the argument

27
00:02:35,800 --> 00:02:40,000
Give me an example from your own life that proves the point

28
00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:45,260
And if I'm wrong, boost in and rectify the record

29
00:02:45,260 --> 00:02:48,460
The board of directors is now in session

30
00:02:48,460 --> 00:02:51,260
The top boost takes the chair

31
00:02:51,260 --> 00:02:53,600
And now for our sermon

32
00:02:53,600 --> 00:02:59,520
Civilization hallucinates itself into existence through contact

33
00:02:59,520 --> 00:03:03,220
We look at a map and see static geometry

34
00:03:03,220 --> 00:03:07,720
Highways, shipping lanes, fiber optic cables

35
00:03:07,720 --> 00:03:11,840
But these are just the scars left behind by desire

36
00:03:11,840 --> 00:03:14,780
The real infrastructure is biological

37
00:03:14,780 --> 00:03:16,920
It's a nervous system

38
00:03:16,920 --> 00:03:21,400
A pulse that jumps from one stranger's hand to another

39
00:03:21,400 --> 00:03:24,640
Ignoring the borders drawn by dead men

40
00:03:24,640 --> 00:03:27,020
When that pulse fails

41
00:03:27,020 --> 00:03:30,060
The world contracts into senility

42
00:03:30,060 --> 00:03:32,880
The memory of the horizon fades

43
00:03:32,880 --> 00:03:35,260
Villages turn inward

44
00:03:35,260 --> 00:03:36,900
Staring at their own feet

45
00:03:36,900 --> 00:03:40,300
Forgetting the taste of spices from the next valley over

46
00:03:40,300 --> 00:03:44,640
Silence between cities grows thick enough

47
00:03:44,640 --> 00:03:51,420
to suffocate them. Isolation feeds atrophy. It rots the muscle of culture until the limb

48
00:03:51,420 --> 00:03:59,400
falls off. But we are watching a resurrection. Walk into a Bitcoin meetup tonight.

49
00:04:00,140 --> 00:04:07,060
You are witnessing the embryonic stage of a caravan. The barroom facade barely conceals

50
00:04:07,060 --> 00:04:14,200
a Silk Road outpost. The beer serves only as lubricant. The signal is the commerce.

51
00:04:14,640 --> 00:04:19,160
History proves that culture is a stowaway on a merchant ship.

52
00:04:20,360 --> 00:04:27,380
The Renaissance exploded from the ledger books of Florentine bankers who needed better math to count their gold.

53
00:04:28,040 --> 00:04:33,340
The art, the philosophy, the beauty, it all bloomed in the exhaust fumes of trade.

54
00:04:34,100 --> 00:04:39,460
The Medici bankrolled the future specifically to solvate the friction of value.

55
00:04:39,980 --> 00:04:41,220
We're doing the same.

56
00:04:41,220 --> 00:04:44,660
Every lightning invoice is a synapse firing

57
00:04:44,660 --> 00:04:46,680
Every handshake is a treaty

58
00:04:46,680 --> 00:04:50,880
We're knitting the severed nerve endings of the world back together

59
00:04:50,880 --> 00:04:53,800
One Bitcoin meetup at a time

60
00:04:53,800 --> 00:04:57,140
Bureaucrats wait for permits to pour asphalt

61
00:04:57,140 --> 00:04:58,980
We simply walk

62
00:04:58,980 --> 00:05:02,240
We walk until the grass dies under our boots

63
00:05:02,240 --> 00:05:06,340
And the path forces the world to acknowledge its existence

64
00:05:06,340 --> 00:05:08,980
The map follows the territory

65
00:05:09,640 --> 00:05:12,620
The walker dictates the geography.

66
00:05:13,660 --> 00:05:19,760
And speaking of Silk Roads, or rather, as my last guest called it, Denim Roads,

67
00:05:20,480 --> 00:05:24,400
joining me is a man who might know a thing or two about the topic.

68
00:05:24,940 --> 00:05:27,760
Ryan Cooper, welcome to Plep Chain Radio.

69
00:05:29,780 --> 00:05:32,080
Thanks, Avi. Really excited to be here, brother.

70
00:05:33,520 --> 00:05:34,360
Absolutely, Ryan.

71
00:05:34,360 --> 00:05:40,500
So I think your name came up both directly and indirectly on a couple of podcasts.

72
00:05:40,940 --> 00:05:47,060
My good friend, who I believe is our common friend, Tom Tabor, was on the show about a month ago.

73
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:57,540
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.

74
00:05:57,720 --> 00:05:59,840
I'm not going to disclose the location unless you want to.

75
00:05:59,960 --> 00:06:01,100
We can get into that.

76
00:06:01,100 --> 00:06:03,560
with someone he'd come across in the Midwest.

77
00:06:05,080 --> 00:06:07,360
And, you know, part of Tom's journey

78
00:06:07,360 --> 00:06:08,900
of getting into the Beef Initiative.

79
00:06:09,140 --> 00:06:12,260
And then Augie, my guest from last week,

80
00:06:13,380 --> 00:06:16,060
had suggested, in fact,

81
00:06:16,100 --> 00:06:17,660
he was the one who helped me connect the dots

82
00:06:17,660 --> 00:06:20,500
that the person Tom was talking about was you.

83
00:06:21,080 --> 00:06:24,220
And he was the one who put us in contact.

84
00:06:24,220 --> 00:06:27,220
So excited for this conversation myself,

85
00:06:27,340 --> 00:06:29,380
learning more about you, what you do,

86
00:06:29,380 --> 00:06:35,160
the denim road as Augie referred to it when he was here last week uh but Ryan for folks who are

87
00:06:35,160 --> 00:06:41,600
not familiar with you and your work why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you

88
00:06:41,600 --> 00:06:51,220
found yourself in the Bitcoin world and and and now the Noster world yeah yeah thanks man um and

89
00:06:51,220 --> 00:06:53,780
Yeah, Tom is a dear friend.

90
00:06:54,160 --> 00:06:55,320
Augie is as well.

91
00:06:56,420 --> 00:07:01,160
I grew up in Michigan, in Detroit, until I was about 10.

92
00:07:01,160 --> 00:07:05,240
And we moved outside of the city.

93
00:07:06,000 --> 00:07:08,600
And I got my first taste of country life.

94
00:07:09,040 --> 00:07:13,580
And we were living in a rural agricultural community.

95
00:07:13,960 --> 00:07:19,260
And so my old farmer neighbors taught me how to fix a tractor and weld.

96
00:07:19,260 --> 00:07:24,660
and I just got my feet wet with farm life.

97
00:07:25,080 --> 00:07:32,760
My mom's been a rebel or a sovereign, you might say, for a long time.

98
00:07:33,120 --> 00:07:35,780
She homeschooled me and my 11 siblings.

99
00:07:37,280 --> 00:07:37,840
11?

100
00:07:38,200 --> 00:07:39,720
Yeah, 11.

101
00:07:39,980 --> 00:07:41,320
That's a whole school right there.

102
00:07:42,020 --> 00:07:45,780
Yeah, she did it for real back when it was gangster in the 90s.

103
00:07:45,780 --> 00:07:52,520
she homeschooled us and, um, and wanted to live cleanly. Like I said, we moved out of Detroit when

104
00:07:52,520 --> 00:08:01,280
I was about 10. So that turned into a garden and then a milk cow. And, um, and so, yeah, I, I, I got

105
00:08:01,280 --> 00:08:11,000
between 10 and, and, uh, my teen years, I got some, um, some dirty work, uh, under my feet,

106
00:08:11,000 --> 00:08:28,540
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.

107
00:08:29,500 --> 00:08:35,960
I was managing a Chevy dealership towards the beginning of the pandemic.

108
00:08:37,340 --> 00:08:42,960
And I really didn't have anything to do with this ag side of my life anymore.

109
00:08:43,180 --> 00:08:46,100
I had traded all of that for a more fiat fast life.

110
00:08:46,940 --> 00:08:48,500
My wife and I had a couple kids.

111
00:08:48,960 --> 00:08:52,380
She's from Finland, so we traveled back and forth to Finland quite a bit.

112
00:08:53,720 --> 00:08:57,400
When the pandemic struck, it just uprooted our whole lives.

113
00:08:57,400 --> 00:09:05,220
And I became really aware that we didn't have a food supply that I could rely on other than Walmart.

114
00:09:05,780 --> 00:09:10,120
And so I just started looking for farmers that would sell us food.

115
00:09:10,560 --> 00:09:12,780
Like I said, I live in a small town called Farmington.

116
00:09:12,860 --> 00:09:14,100
You'd think it'd be easy to do.

117
00:09:14,940 --> 00:09:20,360
But any of us that walk down this path realize very quickly just because people farm around you doesn't mean they grow food.

118
00:09:20,960 --> 00:09:26,640
So we ended up finding a small dairy farm about an hour away from us.

119
00:09:26,640 --> 00:09:35,600
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.

120
00:09:36,180 --> 00:09:43,680
And that was kind of the beginning of our, what we called the milk route and a lot of our farming endeavors.

121
00:09:44,240 --> 00:09:46,740
I ended up quitting that fiat job.

122
00:09:46,840 --> 00:09:47,980
I just couldn't take it anymore.

123
00:09:47,980 --> 00:09:59,060
Um, you know, I, I, I felt like I was on the, the blunt edge of, um, of, uh, tough finance,

124
00:09:59,240 --> 00:10:04,980
you know, you just, uh, I'm training sales guys every day to like maximize profit on grandma

125
00:10:04,980 --> 00:10:06,720
and her car deal.

126
00:10:06,900 --> 00:10:09,860
So anyway, I, I got fed up and I had to get out.

127
00:10:10,180 --> 00:10:15,220
So I quit and thought, you know, I'll start like a farm services business.

128
00:10:15,880 --> 00:10:17,680
I don't have a whole lot of land myself.

129
00:10:18,160 --> 00:10:21,200
My family wasn't steeped in agriculture at the time.

130
00:10:22,060 --> 00:10:25,220
And I just wanted to find some farmers and try to help them out.

131
00:10:25,420 --> 00:10:29,860
The farm that we'd been working with an hour away, her name was Penny.

132
00:10:30,460 --> 00:10:33,020
And she was milking four or five cows on her own.

133
00:10:33,880 --> 00:10:38,920
Her dad and her husband had both died in a fire some years before.

134
00:10:39,140 --> 00:10:40,520
So she was on real hard times.

135
00:10:40,520 --> 00:10:47,940
so real quickly i realized you know there's there's uh people out here who who want to do things

136
00:10:47,940 --> 00:10:53,600
the right way they want to raise food but it's not easy it's not easy to find customers not

137
00:10:53,600 --> 00:10:59,760
easy to find market access and so so i and some uh some friends around here we just started trying

138
00:10:59,760 --> 00:11:07,500
to try to fill that need however we could and um uh we started uh working cattle uh i learned how

139
00:11:07,500 --> 00:11:15,720
of castrate calves. You know, we drive tractors during hay season for farmers that need it.

140
00:11:16,280 --> 00:11:20,820
A lot of the farmers around us specifically, but this is the same all over the world,

141
00:11:21,580 --> 00:11:24,960
you know, they're getting older, they're aging out. Typically, they don't have kids that want

142
00:11:24,960 --> 00:11:30,600
to help or want anything to do with the farm. And so, you know, you might have a farmer with

143
00:11:30,600 --> 00:11:37,020
200 acres of pasture, and he's not got any cows out there because he can't afford to work them

144
00:11:37,020 --> 00:11:43,720
twice a year. So we started to try to fill that need. And that's where we got plugged in with the

145
00:11:43,720 --> 00:11:49,140
Beef Initiative. I contacted Texas Slim real early on when I heard Adam Curry talking about him.

146
00:11:49,720 --> 00:11:53,780
I actually went down to Texas, met him, brought him up here to Missouri to help us start our own

147
00:11:53,780 --> 00:11:59,820
local beef initiative. And a lot of that over the past four or five years has kind of turned into

148
00:11:59,820 --> 00:12:03,880
this Bitcoin ranch theory that we're trying to build locally.

149
00:12:03,880 --> 00:12:08,800
What a story, Ryan.

150
00:12:09,340 --> 00:12:12,780
And it sounds like your mom really was the hero in some sense,

151
00:12:12,880 --> 00:12:14,480
the early hero of all of this.

152
00:12:15,260 --> 00:12:17,860
And you've kind of gravitated back to that.

153
00:12:18,340 --> 00:12:20,720
So let's talk about Bitcoin Ranch.

154
00:12:21,160 --> 00:12:22,860
What is the idea there?

155
00:12:22,980 --> 00:12:25,060
What exactly is a Bitcoin Ranch?

156
00:12:26,100 --> 00:12:26,280
Yeah.

157
00:12:26,920 --> 00:12:33,460
So my best friend, Jake, he lives here in Farmington with me.

158
00:12:33,880 --> 00:12:36,240
And, you know, we both have kids.

159
00:12:37,040 --> 00:12:38,920
We both have busy lives.

160
00:12:38,920 --> 00:12:44,580
And both of us would like to be able to feed our kids something other than crickets in the future.

161
00:12:45,620 --> 00:12:49,740
And, you know, you go out and you start trying to find real food.

162
00:12:50,240 --> 00:12:54,540
And, you know, you can find some snack sticks or some chips somewhere.

163
00:12:54,760 --> 00:12:57,040
And sometimes, if you're lucky, even some raw milk.

164
00:12:57,940 --> 00:13:00,880
But it's difficult to put a table together.

165
00:13:01,100 --> 00:13:02,000
It's not easy.

166
00:13:02,000 --> 00:13:05,000
and it's getting harder and harder.

167
00:13:06,640 --> 00:13:08,640
Farms are going under every year.

168
00:13:08,640 --> 00:13:15,840
So just from our perspective, some years ago,

169
00:13:16,080 --> 00:13:19,780
we were looking at it like, man, we want to be consumers,

170
00:13:20,220 --> 00:13:22,160
but we can't even find the producers.

171
00:13:22,820 --> 00:13:25,400
And so to become the best consumers we could,

172
00:13:25,540 --> 00:13:27,680
we started trying to seek out these producers,

173
00:13:28,240 --> 00:13:30,120
really started to try to encourage them.

174
00:13:30,120 --> 00:13:32,880
we started what we call a homesteader breakfast.

175
00:13:33,300 --> 00:13:36,120
We had it every Saturday at a local church in town.

176
00:13:36,680 --> 00:13:38,780
And we just tried to gather local producers

177
00:13:38,780 --> 00:13:41,080
and entrepreneurs and farmers and homesteaders

178
00:13:41,080 --> 00:13:43,080
and people who were interested in real food.

179
00:13:44,760 --> 00:13:47,020
You know, obviously Bitcoiners

180
00:13:47,020 --> 00:13:59,210
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

181
00:13:59,210 --> 00:14:06,370
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.

182
00:14:06,990 --> 00:14:14,870
We've got a cafe built out, and we have Bitcoiners travel from all over the world to come have breakfast now and then.

183
00:14:15,090 --> 00:14:17,210
So it's pretty special.

184
00:14:17,210 --> 00:14:27,210
So Bitcoin Ranch was really the evolution of what we early on called our St. Francis County Beef Initiative, which is where we live.

185
00:14:27,910 --> 00:14:30,130
And we just wanted to take initiative around our food.

186
00:14:30,790 --> 00:14:37,290
And as we pumped that signal out, you know, I think sometimes as Bitcoiners, you know, we're rebels.

187
00:14:37,650 --> 00:14:42,630
It's easy to kind of hide and be quiet and try to find our little group.

188
00:14:43,490 --> 00:14:46,490
But I live in a town with 18,000 people.

189
00:14:46,490 --> 00:14:47,870
It's pretty small here.

190
00:14:47,990 --> 00:14:49,670
It's not too hard to be loud.

191
00:14:51,650 --> 00:14:53,850
And so we were.

192
00:14:53,950 --> 00:14:56,770
We've been loud for the past couple of years, and we found a lot of friends.

193
00:14:56,870 --> 00:15:03,070
We found a lot of farmers that do want to start maybe thinking about farming the way great-grandpa did.

194
00:15:04,630 --> 00:15:11,970
And we found a lot of people who are willing to pay $25 for a pasture-raised chicken instead of $5 at Costco.

195
00:15:11,970 --> 00:15:23,030
And so building a lot of these relationships has been the focus of what we call ourselves Bitcoin Ranch crew have worked on.

196
00:15:23,670 --> 00:15:32,170
You know, our grander vision would be to get, you know, 10, 20, 50, 100 farms around my family.

197
00:15:32,370 --> 00:15:36,750
You know, I got four kids and most of my 11 siblings still live around here.

198
00:15:36,750 --> 00:15:42,330
And so just feeding our tribe is kind of a big deal.

199
00:15:43,250 --> 00:15:50,010
And what it's evolved into is people I have found really want to do these things.

200
00:15:50,170 --> 00:15:51,270
They feel very alone.

201
00:15:51,450 --> 00:15:55,250
It's not easy to do if you think you're the odd one out.

202
00:15:56,290 --> 00:16:00,290
But my brother has started the farm a couple years ago.

203
00:16:00,470 --> 00:16:03,090
My dad has been building a farm for the past couple years.

204
00:16:03,610 --> 00:16:08,330
I've got, you know, four or five local farmers that are starting to try to raise clean beef.

205
00:16:08,750 --> 00:16:10,450
They want to go direct to consumer.

206
00:16:10,910 --> 00:16:11,650
They don't want to start.

207
00:16:11,770 --> 00:16:14,030
They don't want to be selling their beef at the stockyards anymore.

208
00:16:14,870 --> 00:16:18,610
A couple of them, you know, have taken orange pill.

209
00:16:20,010 --> 00:16:23,510
So, you know, Bitcoin Ranch, I mean, I'm a visionary.

210
00:16:23,850 --> 00:16:28,710
I've got some of this sketched out for the next hundred years in my community here, in our home.

211
00:16:28,710 --> 00:16:38,390
but uh you know right now bitcoin ranch is kind of a decentralized farm incubator program where

212
00:16:38,390 --> 00:16:44,230
we're doing everything we can to make sure we have clean water good food uh you know i think

213
00:16:44,230 --> 00:16:49,390
that we probably have some things in common with uh you know establishing reliable comms with

214
00:16:49,390 --> 00:16:55,270
nostr and meshtastic and we're trying to get some of those things rolled out uh to our community

215
00:16:55,270 --> 00:17:01,170
here. We spend a lot of time in local politics with our mayor, county commissioner, just a lot

216
00:17:01,170 --> 00:17:10,190
of relationship building. So Bitcoin Ranch makes a whole lot of sense to Bitcoiners. And it seems

217
00:17:10,190 --> 00:17:17,250
kind of obnoxious and preposterous to anybody who isn't. But when I show up to a farm that's really

218
00:17:17,250 --> 00:17:23,710
struggling for a volunteer day, and I have, you know, I have six, seven, eight volunteers,

219
00:17:23,710 --> 00:17:29,430
of Bitcoiners who come from the area, and we tell them, hey, Bitcoin Ranch is here to help you for a day.

220
00:17:30,310 --> 00:17:31,950
It really makes an impact.

221
00:17:32,230 --> 00:17:37,470
And I'd like to think that in our environment here, in our community,

222
00:17:38,030 --> 00:17:44,450
sometimes we are the first time somebody, you know, these old farmers have ever heard the word Bitcoin.

223
00:17:45,270 --> 00:17:47,110
And so we're trying to kind of soften them up.

224
00:17:47,190 --> 00:17:48,830
You know, we probably aren't going to orange pill them.

225
00:17:48,830 --> 00:17:57,810
but we can maybe take off the edge of whatever this revolutionary thing is that's coming.

226
00:17:58,690 --> 00:17:59,590
I love that.

227
00:17:59,790 --> 00:18:02,790
So just to replay this back, Ryan,

228
00:18:03,450 --> 00:18:05,870
Big Gold Ranch started as this communal table,

229
00:18:06,290 --> 00:18:10,730
maybe just for your large family, which sounds amazing, by the way.

230
00:18:11,090 --> 00:18:14,030
I would love to just be around such a large family.

231
00:18:14,030 --> 00:18:20,130
uh so it's just this communal table where you sourced high quality food instead of

232
00:18:20,130 --> 00:18:27,050
slop right fiat slop which everyone eats uh most people eat uh so it started off with that and then

233
00:18:27,050 --> 00:18:31,930
you realize you could actually build out a coordination network between people and then

234
00:18:31,930 --> 00:18:38,590
people started getting attracted to this to say hey how can i how can i up level my produce my uh

235
00:18:38,590 --> 00:18:45,630
my farm produce my animals what have you right and now it's slowly blossoming into a net a

236
00:18:45,630 --> 00:18:51,470
distribution network is that yeah is that fair yeah yeah and i would say you know distribution is

237
00:18:51,470 --> 00:18:58,250
man it's a hard problem to solve you know early on in our conversations years ago uh we would sit

238
00:18:58,250 --> 00:19:06,190
around and we would talk about uh you know um like automated food sheds and um uh and uh you know

239
00:19:06,190 --> 00:19:10,650
the holistic Schwann's truck that we could drive around town and sell food.

240
00:19:11,050 --> 00:19:17,890
It's just very difficult to do that and try to make a business out of it.

241
00:19:18,790 --> 00:19:21,750
I wouldn't say we've done that effectively.

242
00:19:22,210 --> 00:19:28,290
What we have done, though, is we've created enough support

243
00:19:28,290 --> 00:19:32,250
to where if somebody wants to donate their time

244
00:19:32,250 --> 00:19:36,790
and maybe help subsidize their own family's food consumption.

245
00:19:37,750 --> 00:19:40,950
We can facilitate where to go to get food.

246
00:19:41,330 --> 00:19:45,330
We can, you know, plug you in with people around you.

247
00:19:45,870 --> 00:19:49,550
Some of our St. Louis guys drive down regularly.

248
00:19:51,690 --> 00:19:56,690
My one in particular, Scott, he comes down once a week to do a milk route,

249
00:19:57,850 --> 00:19:59,890
and we deliver milk.

250
00:19:59,890 --> 00:20:02,650
I think his route's probably two or three hours long.

251
00:20:04,590 --> 00:20:12,910
And that's where a lot of this idea for a denim road or a silk road across our region here,

252
00:20:13,150 --> 00:20:16,050
where we could start trading more goods and more services.

253
00:20:17,310 --> 00:20:25,330
A lot of it's going to be voluntary, but a lot of us are willing to do it anyway.

254
00:20:26,650 --> 00:20:27,170
Yeah.

255
00:20:28,170 --> 00:20:29,010
Yeah, sorry.

256
00:20:29,010 --> 00:20:30,990
if that answers your question.

257
00:20:31,110 --> 00:20:31,630
No, it does.

258
00:20:31,950 --> 00:20:36,970
I would say it is a distribution network,

259
00:20:37,790 --> 00:20:43,910
but the distribution network is very difficult to nail down.

260
00:20:44,470 --> 00:20:49,070
What we're really focused on right now is finding producers

261
00:20:49,070 --> 00:20:52,850
and finding consumers, and then most of the time,

262
00:20:52,850 --> 00:20:57,470
the distribution happens by us sending that consumer out

263
00:20:57,470 --> 00:20:58,930
to go shake that rancher's hand.

264
00:20:59,010 --> 00:21:06,090
You know, for example, I, you know, we, we, we, um, so I have some dairy cows and we sell,

265
00:21:06,250 --> 00:21:13,270
we sell raw milk. Um, we do, we do door to door delivery. So we, we'll take a jar of milk and

266
00:21:13,270 --> 00:21:17,910
we'll put it on your front doorstep. And if you're a Bitcoiner in our area, uh, we have Bitcoiners

267
00:21:17,910 --> 00:21:23,670
that'll bring it straight to your home. And, um, you know, we accept sats and, um, and, and hugs,

268
00:21:23,670 --> 00:21:30,950
but uh but it's really expensive it's not economical the people who are usually i mean

269
00:21:30,950 --> 00:21:36,650
we've got some guys who have been buying milk from us every week for years and they're uh they

270
00:21:36,650 --> 00:21:44,170
they know that they're they're supporting something of value um but if the if you wanted

271
00:21:44,170 --> 00:21:50,990
to actually fix the distribution problem i think that micro stores have to be involved which uh you

272
00:21:50,990 --> 00:21:55,130
know the beef initiative in texas has been working on that for a little while how would that work the

273
00:21:55,130 --> 00:22:00,190
concept of microstores would that be would they be spread across this belt and by the way i'm

274
00:22:00,190 --> 00:22:06,770
looking at the map here uh just to orient myself with some of these places where the meshtadel and

275
00:22:06,770 --> 00:22:14,270
and the denim road so if i had to draw a belt right or or like yeah i guess a belt across the

276
00:22:14,270 --> 00:22:18,110
country it wouldn't be a straight line uh it wouldn't be a vertical line it would be more

277
00:22:18,110 --> 00:22:25,950
diagonal, probably starting in, let's say, the width of Texas, but then it would go, it would

278
00:22:25,950 --> 00:22:35,330
encompass Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, right? And sort of just go diagonally across the

279
00:22:35,330 --> 00:22:41,310
country that way. Because that's where there seems to be the most activity. All this, there's stuff

280
00:22:41,310 --> 00:22:46,050
happening in Pennsylvania too, but then there's Ohio in the middle. I don't know if anything's

281
00:22:46,050 --> 00:22:52,990
happening in Ohio. But with all of that said, how would the microstores concept work across this

282
00:22:52,990 --> 00:23:02,150
belt? Yeah. So we're actually, we're getting ready to launch our first one right now. It's been about

283
00:23:02,150 --> 00:23:06,810
two years in the work, just kind of thinking how we wanted to do it. But basically, we, the way we

284
00:23:06,810 --> 00:23:14,390
envision it is you buy a storage shed and, you know, these like Mennonite built storage sheds.

285
00:23:14,390 --> 00:23:19,430
and you retrofit it so you can control the climate,

286
00:23:21,250 --> 00:23:26,030
put some type of RFID card access on the door.

287
00:23:26,330 --> 00:23:29,130
We'd actually like to get like,

288
00:23:29,430 --> 00:23:31,350
because it'll be member only.

289
00:23:31,710 --> 00:23:34,070
That becomes a real issue with a lot of these things

290
00:23:34,070 --> 00:23:36,610
is how to circumvent the legality.

291
00:23:36,610 --> 00:23:38,850
The friend I was telling about, Jake,

292
00:23:38,910 --> 00:23:40,470
we've coordinated on a lot of this.

293
00:23:41,210 --> 00:23:43,790
He's a lawyer, and so he navigates a lot of that for us.

294
00:23:43,790 --> 00:23:48,210
So these are private member establishments.

295
00:23:48,390 --> 00:23:54,590
You as a producer would rent a shelf in there, essentially, maybe some refrigerator space.

296
00:23:55,270 --> 00:23:59,750
And you would market yourself in that mini store.

297
00:23:59,950 --> 00:24:01,930
You would stock yourself in that mini store.

298
00:24:02,510 --> 00:24:09,290
And then the consumers would have access to the store, like I said, by an RFID access.

299
00:24:09,290 --> 00:24:13,850
but we would like to use Noster end pubs in the future.

300
00:24:14,390 --> 00:24:18,790
Or, yeah, we've played with a couple different ideas.

301
00:24:18,830 --> 00:24:23,350
But anyway, you'd get access as a consumer to the store for a monthly fee,

302
00:24:23,870 --> 00:24:30,530
and you can purchase from the 30 different farms that we have stocking this facility.

303
00:24:31,850 --> 00:24:34,190
That's kind of the rough idea for us.

304
00:24:35,150 --> 00:24:41,650
I think there's a couple different models that Cole Bolton has played with down south.

305
00:24:42,970 --> 00:24:45,790
You know, this sort of reminds me a little bit.

306
00:24:45,890 --> 00:24:47,650
So I'm based in upstate New York.

307
00:24:47,710 --> 00:24:48,590
I'm in the mountains here.

308
00:24:49,290 --> 00:24:51,910
And it's very different from New York City, I'll tell you that.

309
00:24:53,090 --> 00:24:56,770
And I'm about to talk about the honor system that some of the farms have here,

310
00:24:56,830 --> 00:24:58,930
which there is no honor system in New York City, right?

311
00:24:58,930 --> 00:25:10,830
But so here, so when I go to buy raw milk, I have to drive down 20 minutes to a remote farm.

312
00:25:11,170 --> 00:25:11,950
I go in.

313
00:25:12,230 --> 00:25:13,030
There's the shed.

314
00:25:13,250 --> 00:25:14,110
I enter the shed.

315
00:25:14,290 --> 00:25:14,970
There's no RFID.

316
00:25:16,010 --> 00:25:17,230
It's old school.

317
00:25:17,530 --> 00:25:19,870
There's a door bolt, which isn't even locked.

318
00:25:20,270 --> 00:25:20,850
I go in.

319
00:25:20,950 --> 00:25:22,210
I go into the refrigerator.

320
00:25:22,210 --> 00:25:24,470
I pull out a couple of gallons of raw milk.

321
00:25:24,470 --> 00:25:29,170
and then there's a little box for cash

322
00:25:29,170 --> 00:25:31,150
where I'm putting five bucks per gallon

323
00:25:31,150 --> 00:25:32,510
and then there's a register

324
00:25:32,510 --> 00:25:33,850
where I'm supposed to write my name.

325
00:25:34,350 --> 00:25:35,790
So obviously I do everything

326
00:25:35,790 --> 00:25:37,070
except write my name in the register

327
00:25:37,070 --> 00:25:38,090
and then I leave.

328
00:25:40,050 --> 00:25:42,670
And it's beginning to sound a little bit like that.

329
00:25:42,750 --> 00:25:44,310
It's like slightly more modern

330
00:25:44,310 --> 00:25:46,210
and cypherpunk version of this.

331
00:25:46,610 --> 00:25:48,330
Now, in some sense,

332
00:25:48,430 --> 00:25:49,930
what I just described to you,

333
00:25:49,930 --> 00:25:51,370
my experience getting raw milk

334
00:25:51,370 --> 00:25:54,430
is almost a value-for-value type.

335
00:25:54,570 --> 00:25:56,050
It's more on a system,

336
00:25:56,150 --> 00:25:56,610
but it's also,

337
00:25:56,830 --> 00:25:58,710
there is an element of value-for-value there, right?

338
00:25:58,710 --> 00:26:00,230
Which is like, look, it's five bucks.

339
00:26:01,050 --> 00:26:02,410
Please put the money in the box.

340
00:26:02,930 --> 00:26:05,830
So for these micro stores that you're talking about,

341
00:26:05,950 --> 00:26:07,210
is there going to be a shopkeeper

342
00:26:07,210 --> 00:26:09,290
who's enforcing the payment

343
00:26:09,290 --> 00:26:12,610
or is it a value-for-value on a system type thing?

344
00:26:13,730 --> 00:26:15,530
Yeah, so no, they wouldn't,

345
00:26:15,850 --> 00:26:17,310
there would be no attendant.

346
00:26:17,310 --> 00:26:25,430
And I really like the situation that you have right now, and I hope that you can have that as long as possible.

347
00:26:25,810 --> 00:26:31,570
And we have a lot of private farm stands around here that operate the same way.

348
00:26:33,750 --> 00:26:42,570
What I'm trying to emulate, so this past year, I have some nephews in Finland, a lot of nephews in Finland, actually.

349
00:26:42,570 --> 00:26:44,510
So I'm one of 12 kids.

350
00:26:44,510 --> 00:26:46,510
My wife is one of 15.

351
00:26:47,410 --> 00:26:51,770
So there's 27 of us between our four parents.

352
00:26:52,830 --> 00:26:57,070
And so when she's the youngest and I'm the oldest, so I've just got this like massive family.

353
00:26:58,070 --> 00:27:04,050
But I've got this, I've got a nephew in Finland who comes over and works with me sometimes.

354
00:27:04,050 --> 00:27:12,070
And he's real sweet hearted and has a real, real, has a real passion for the farmers.

355
00:27:12,490 --> 00:27:17,630
And so I told him, I said, hey, go over there and find me some regenerative type farmers, you know.

356
00:27:18,050 --> 00:27:21,730
And so he's been scouring over, you know, his part of Finland.

357
00:27:22,030 --> 00:27:26,510
And this year when I went to go visit him, he had a couple dairy farms wanted to visit.

358
00:27:27,070 --> 00:27:32,030
And they all had different types of honor systems similar to what you just described.

359
00:27:32,390 --> 00:27:40,210
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.

360
00:27:40,210 --> 00:27:57,100
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

361
00:27:57,100 --> 00:28:03,500
it was I drove up to this thing. It's got a locked door. It's got a phone number. I text the phone

362
00:28:03,500 --> 00:28:12,600
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

363
00:28:12,600 --> 00:28:17,280
door and I have access to the store. And I walk in there and it's a, you know, like a little,

364
00:28:17,820 --> 00:28:23,700
you know, like a little Aldi's or something. There's no attendant. There is a self-serve

365
00:28:23,700 --> 00:28:29,280
cash register and there's a camera up in the corner. And once or twice a week,

366
00:28:29,280 --> 00:28:35,500
volunteers from the town, little old ladies come in, they clean the shop, they restock the shop.

367
00:28:36,300 --> 00:28:43,200
And now they've got a place where they can, you know, create some inventory. And, and as a

368
00:28:43,200 --> 00:28:47,500
community decide, hey, we want to invest in some, you know, we want to have soap in here, we want,

369
00:28:47,500 --> 00:28:52,700
we want to, you know, bring in paper towels or whatever. That's really what I would like

370
00:28:52,700 --> 00:29:00,080
to kind of bump this up to. I think the farm store out in front of the farm, you know, and you've got

371
00:29:00,080 --> 00:29:06,080
an honor system is awesome. And in the perfect world, I think that's probably what we get to.

372
00:29:06,700 --> 00:29:11,860
But for right now, and especially the next 20 years going through what I think we're going to

373
00:29:11,860 --> 00:29:19,160
go through, we're gonna have a lot of people who are producing very valuable food. And they might

374
00:29:19,160 --> 00:29:26,520
not want to welcome people to their family farm to sell that food. They're going to need

375
00:29:26,520 --> 00:29:33,720
like a one-layer. We said for a long time, we call ourselves the milkman. We said we're trying

376
00:29:33,720 --> 00:29:37,440
to get rid of all the middle guys. And then eventually we realized, well, we're trying to

377
00:29:37,440 --> 00:29:43,140
get rid of most of the middle guys because there have to be a couple. There has to be one or two.

378
00:29:43,140 --> 00:29:58,040
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.

379
00:29:58,440 --> 00:30:03,060
And they want to sell it, but like I said, they're raising kids and they don't want to put their address online.

380
00:30:03,060 --> 00:30:17,160
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.

381
00:30:17,860 --> 00:30:21,560
I think it's what is it? Seven ranchers a day or something like that.

382
00:30:23,120 --> 00:30:25,280
It's some absurd number like that.

383
00:30:25,860 --> 00:30:27,960
Yeah, that sounds low to me.

384
00:30:28,080 --> 00:30:28,220
Yeah.

385
00:30:28,340 --> 00:30:32,900
But yeah, maybe more. Maybe it's 30. Right. A day just fall off the map.

386
00:30:33,060 --> 00:30:42,860
So you're going to have a handful of these homesteaders, ranchers, who are producing, as you said, incredibly valuable food.

387
00:30:42,920 --> 00:30:49,480
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.

388
00:30:50,560 --> 00:30:52,700
And then you're going to have communities that need food.

389
00:30:53,520 --> 00:30:56,780
Or they can devolve into fiat slop, right?

390
00:30:56,960 --> 00:31:02,300
But there will be, I'm certain there will be more demand than supply at some point, right?

391
00:31:02,300 --> 00:31:04,380
it's got to get to that point.

392
00:31:05,420 --> 00:31:05,500
Yeah.

393
00:31:05,820 --> 00:31:09,400
I mean, that poses a sort of a societal risk, doesn't it?

394
00:31:11,260 --> 00:31:12,340
If you have children.

395
00:31:15,020 --> 00:31:16,300
Yeah, yeah, it does.

396
00:31:16,580 --> 00:31:17,040
It does.

397
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:18,020
I mean, it's...

398
00:31:18,020 --> 00:31:23,700
I mean, if you have children, it's chilling.

399
00:31:24,300 --> 00:31:25,900
You know, my oldest is 10.

400
00:31:26,460 --> 00:31:28,300
My youngest is four months.

401
00:31:28,300 --> 00:31:32,680
and I want to be able to feed them real food for the next 50 years,

402
00:31:33,560 --> 00:31:37,020
I have no confidence that I'll be able to do so.

403
00:31:38,840 --> 00:31:43,960
And if I am able to, I'm very sure that it is because

404
00:31:43,960 --> 00:31:47,280
I'm working with the person growing it.

405
00:31:48,500 --> 00:31:49,240
You know?

406
00:31:49,620 --> 00:31:58,120
I mean, if you are still on some type of legacy social media,

407
00:31:58,120 --> 00:32:05,480
like Facebook or Instagram, you see this AI slop just eating people right now. It's crazy, man.

408
00:32:05,840 --> 00:32:11,080
It's crazy. And just the realization that like, oh my gosh, I will never be able to let my family

409
00:32:11,080 --> 00:32:18,280
get anywhere close to this. And if they do, they will have to know that none of this is real.

410
00:32:18,860 --> 00:32:23,920
None of this is real. Hey, if you want to go grab a, you know, McDouble, I'm not going to,

411
00:32:23,920 --> 00:32:26,540
I'm not going to be the guy harping on you.

412
00:32:26,940 --> 00:32:28,860
But don't pretend it's real food.

413
00:32:29,500 --> 00:32:30,220
You know what I mean?

414
00:32:30,660 --> 00:32:36,540
And so don't pretend that we're going to have access to real nutrition unless we build it.

415
00:32:36,960 --> 00:32:42,900
Don't pretend we're going to have access to real money unless we build it or real communications unless we build it.

416
00:32:43,040 --> 00:32:44,920
This is our game now.

417
00:32:47,060 --> 00:32:47,540
Yeah.

418
00:32:48,320 --> 00:32:50,640
So let's get back to the microstores, right?

419
00:32:50,640 --> 00:32:55,120
I mean, maybe set aside the potentially dystopian future.

420
00:32:55,540 --> 00:32:57,140
Hopefully not.

421
00:32:58,100 --> 00:33:02,420
Hey, just to be clear, I'm actually, I'm super hopeful.

422
00:33:02,600 --> 00:33:02,720
Yeah.

423
00:33:02,820 --> 00:33:18,800
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.

424
00:33:18,800 --> 00:33:25,080
and information than any of my ancestors have ever had in the history of humankind.

425
00:33:25,500 --> 00:33:27,620
You know, we're going to do great.

426
00:33:28,220 --> 00:33:33,760
We just need to do, you know, you need to, we need to like circle some wagons, find some

427
00:33:33,760 --> 00:33:35,340
friends, build some community.

428
00:33:35,720 --> 00:33:41,880
And, and I mean, the little house in the prairie village out on the, you know, on the frontier,

429
00:33:42,540 --> 00:33:45,140
you know, we're going to outcompete them.

430
00:33:45,400 --> 00:33:46,880
We're going to do fantastic.

431
00:33:46,880 --> 00:33:54,480
but it's not going to be here by accident you know um so yeah sorry man i i don't mean to be

432
00:33:54,480 --> 00:33:59,500
a doomer no i i actually think that things are going to go great if people are intentional

433
00:33:59,500 --> 00:34:06,420
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

434
00:34:06,420 --> 00:34:11,660
as well right because it is it is sometimes like you just what is the worst that could happen and

435
00:34:11,660 --> 00:34:15,660
then you go there and like oh crap okay let's just talk about what we can do to actually fix this

436
00:34:15,660 --> 00:34:22,520
so let's talk about the the this a network or a mesh here right so you're talking about microstores

437
00:34:22,520 --> 00:34:29,960
um and you have a bunch let's say that pop up in missouri uh but they do they might not have

438
00:34:29,960 --> 00:34:37,680
everything that some someone local is looking for right maybe the ones in the next state do

439
00:34:37,680 --> 00:34:42,220
maybe there's something in in tennessee there's a microstore in tennessee that's that sells a

440
00:34:42,220 --> 00:34:49,420
special kind of meat or you know um and in my mind this is where sort of the idea of the mesh

441
00:34:49,420 --> 00:34:55,380
comes in which is this these these little nodes the in in your case they'd be micro stores that

442
00:34:55,380 --> 00:35:00,300
are coordinating with each other maybe it's through nostor for the for the settlement piece

443
00:35:00,300 --> 00:35:07,260
and then you'll need some kind of decentralized courier service that that's able to get uh things

444
00:35:07,260 --> 00:35:08,340
from A to B, right?

445
00:35:08,940 --> 00:35:11,620
Is that something that you're thinking about?

446
00:35:11,820 --> 00:35:14,840
Because when I heard Augie last week

447
00:35:14,840 --> 00:35:16,200
talk about the denim road,

448
00:35:16,520 --> 00:35:18,800
that's where my mind went,

449
00:35:18,900 --> 00:35:20,960
which is these decentralized nodes,

450
00:35:21,080 --> 00:35:23,040
having a coordination system,

451
00:35:23,460 --> 00:35:27,240
having a way of delivering the physical goods

452
00:35:27,240 --> 00:35:29,280
from one node to another.

453
00:35:31,360 --> 00:35:31,920
Yeah.

454
00:35:32,380 --> 00:35:33,460
Yeah, I would say,

455
00:35:33,700 --> 00:35:35,560
I spent some time thinking about this

456
00:35:35,560 --> 00:35:37,980
a couple years ago.

457
00:35:38,360 --> 00:35:40,640
And it's not something that I focus on a lot right now.

458
00:35:41,120 --> 00:35:45,100
It is something that Augie is very attentive to.

459
00:35:45,900 --> 00:35:49,480
And, you know, sometimes we just have to chop the wood that's in front of us.

460
00:35:50,180 --> 00:35:57,920
And in my experience, anything grander than my little neighborhood project

461
00:35:57,920 --> 00:36:02,840
is going to take some technical genius that I just don't have.

462
00:36:02,840 --> 00:36:10,460
And so I'm really excited to see some of these guys, Scott and Augie and Spence.

463
00:36:10,720 --> 00:36:16,400
There's people working on how to get things moved across state.

464
00:36:17,540 --> 00:36:25,720
I'm pretty impressed that we've had a milk rat running for three or four years now, as consistently as we have.

465
00:36:25,940 --> 00:36:27,720
But it hasn't been because of me.

466
00:36:27,720 --> 00:36:30,480
so

467
00:36:30,480 --> 00:36:33,960
I just say that to say

468
00:36:33,960 --> 00:36:36,640
Kansas City, St. Louis

469
00:36:36,640 --> 00:36:38,900
Nashville, these are kind of hubs

470
00:36:38,900 --> 00:36:39,960
within reach of us

471
00:36:39,960 --> 00:36:42,400
and I would love to see

472
00:36:42,400 --> 00:36:43,140
more

473
00:36:43,140 --> 00:36:46,540
trade and commerce

474
00:36:46,540 --> 00:36:48,440
and courier

475
00:36:48,440 --> 00:36:49,920
back and forth

476
00:36:49,920 --> 00:36:52,960
I'm

477
00:36:52,960 --> 00:36:54,960
going to be riding

478
00:36:54,960 --> 00:36:56,820
on that bus versus helping

479
00:36:56,820 --> 00:37:06,180
drive it if that makes sense yeah but you see signs of it coming right yeah i do i do you know

480
00:37:06,180 --> 00:37:11,140
i do see signs of it coming um so

481
00:37:11,140 --> 00:37:17,820
maybe i'm caught a bit in the practical here um

482
00:37:17,820 --> 00:37:26,620
you know i quit my i quit my job some years back to focus on this stuff full time

483
00:37:26,620 --> 00:37:28,920
and I went broke really fast.

484
00:37:31,220 --> 00:37:36,120
And so I realized, hey, you know, there's lots of ideas.

485
00:37:37,160 --> 00:37:39,320
It's hard to get people to work together.

486
00:37:39,640 --> 00:37:41,620
A really great way to get people to work together

487
00:37:41,620 --> 00:37:43,280
is build a business that's productive

488
00:37:43,280 --> 00:37:44,500
and you can compensate them.

489
00:37:45,620 --> 00:37:52,380
And so I'm really focused on what we can do

490
00:37:52,380 --> 00:37:59,460
what we can do in that space locally right now.

491
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:09,080
I have a hard time imagining us moving goods out to Colorado,

492
00:38:09,900 --> 00:38:14,300
but it could happen.

493
00:38:14,420 --> 00:38:15,440
I'm sorry, Avi.

494
00:38:15,840 --> 00:38:19,400
I might not be like the rah-rah guy on this one.

495
00:38:19,400 --> 00:38:24,420
I've just seen, I've put together a lot of routes that have fallen apart.

496
00:38:25,680 --> 00:38:28,000
And you know what I expect to happen?

497
00:38:29,100 --> 00:38:36,520
I expect things that the fiat world values highly to become worth less.

498
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:44,660
And, you know, proof of work things like what we're talking about right now to become worth a lot more.

499
00:38:44,660 --> 00:38:51,260
and when that happens i think there's going to be a lot more human energy focused on trying to get

500
00:38:51,260 --> 00:38:59,460
the stuff moved around but right now right now if you want you know you i think you just said

501
00:38:59,460 --> 00:39:07,680
five dollars a gallon for for your milk you know that dairy farmer is losing his ass you know um

502
00:39:07,680 --> 00:39:13,800
it's like uh you know we've all we've all known like a you know a small craft person who's who

503
00:39:13,800 --> 00:39:17,040
thinks they're running a business, but then, you know, you really get into it and it's like, man,

504
00:39:17,080 --> 00:39:23,040
this person just has a really sucky job that doesn't pay them very well. There's no way to

505
00:39:23,040 --> 00:39:30,240
scale that, you know? And so, I mean, I think beef will become incredibly expensive in the future.

506
00:39:30,600 --> 00:39:35,880
Raw milk. We sell raw milk for $20 a gallon here. What? I think raw milk, I think raw milk will

507
00:39:35,880 --> 00:39:42,020
become incredibly expensive in the future. I tell my wife, like, you know, ground beef will be caviar

508
00:39:42,020 --> 00:39:43,220
before this is done.

509
00:39:44,840 --> 00:39:47,500
So once that happens, you know,

510
00:39:47,620 --> 00:39:49,100
I think there'll be a lot of incentives

511
00:39:49,100 --> 00:39:54,440
for people to figure out how to grow this food,

512
00:39:54,840 --> 00:39:57,940
how to get this food, and how to distribute this food.

513
00:39:58,460 --> 00:40:01,140
You know, you're familiar with CrowdHealth?

514
00:40:01,260 --> 00:40:01,420
Yeah.

515
00:40:02,940 --> 00:40:06,020
CrowdHealth, I just saw a post by them today.

516
00:40:06,020 --> 00:40:08,720
They give away a quarter of a cow once a year.

517
00:40:08,720 --> 00:40:16,940
and uh they uh the guy who supplies that cow is jake steaks and i know jake i just saw that he

518
00:40:16,940 --> 00:40:22,260
posted i was like oh man that's awesome because i know jake from years ago jake started buying

519
00:40:22,260 --> 00:40:27,940
grass-finished beef for him and his family and realized it was super expensive so he started

520
00:40:27,940 --> 00:40:32,940
subsidizing that by buying a little bit more and selling it piecemeal to his you know to friends

521
00:40:32,940 --> 00:40:38,500
and then it grew and grew and grew and all of a sudden you know i'm i'm talking with jake and

522
00:40:38,500 --> 00:40:41,880
And he's like, hey, I've got two beef in the back of my van.

523
00:40:42,020 --> 00:40:48,040
I'm driving to California to go drop it off at some military base somewhere, you know.

524
00:40:48,500 --> 00:40:54,980
And so all of a sudden, you know, this guy kind of gets activated.

525
00:40:55,920 --> 00:41:04,760
But at the same time that he's out there distributing beef, my mom called me and she wanted to buy a cow.

526
00:41:05,620 --> 00:41:14,560
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.

527
00:41:15,720 --> 00:41:30,220
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.

528
00:41:30,220 --> 00:41:49,950
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

529
00:41:49,950 --> 00:41:56,970
will go out of business. And unless new dairy farmers start up, we won't have any dairy farmers.

530
00:41:57,150 --> 00:42:03,210
I mean, I know every dairy farmer, you know, in a fifth, you know, in some type of radius of me.

531
00:42:03,210 --> 00:42:08,550
and I know that every single one of them will be done in the next five to ten years

532
00:42:08,550 --> 00:42:12,450
because they're getting old and at some point they're not going to be able to do it for another winter.

533
00:42:12,810 --> 00:42:15,790
And I don't know anybody who's starting to milk cows.

534
00:42:16,210 --> 00:42:21,070
I actually, and that's not true, I know two homesteading families that left the city

535
00:42:21,070 --> 00:42:25,270
and started homesteads to milk cows and sold their cows after three years because it's hard.

536
00:42:25,270 --> 00:42:28,790
You milk cows twice a day, seven days a week, forever.

537
00:42:28,790 --> 00:42:37,310
so a lot of this stuff is like hey in the future it's not going to be that way but people are going

538
00:42:37,310 --> 00:42:42,650
to pay a ton of money for their food and there will be some people out there who are willing to

539
00:42:42,650 --> 00:42:49,110
grow it and distribute it and figure it out i don't see it happening around me right now so i'm

540
00:42:49,110 --> 00:42:55,070
frantically trying to get my brother to raise sheep my neighbor to raise beef and and we're

541
00:42:55,070 --> 00:43:00,630
having a lot of success but i'm constantly over here in the corner just saying like hey guys

542
00:43:00,630 --> 00:43:07,110
i know it's hard right now being a beef farmer is going to be very productive and very fruitful

543
00:43:07,110 --> 00:43:15,470
in the future you know and um yeah who can afford those numbers though right i mean 20 bucks for

544
00:43:15,470 --> 00:43:20,890
gallon i wouldn't have raw milk if i had to pay 20 bucks a gallon yeah yeah yeah well okay let me

545
00:43:20,890 --> 00:43:22,790
Let me reframe it a little bit.

546
00:43:23,150 --> 00:43:27,050
It's $10 a gallon if you go buy it from local farms around us.

547
00:43:27,750 --> 00:43:31,070
We deliver it to people's house for $20 a gallon.

548
00:43:31,270 --> 00:43:34,350
So, you know, we sell it for $10 a jar.

549
00:43:36,410 --> 00:43:41,450
You know, I mean, hamburgers, $10 a pound, you know.

550
00:43:41,690 --> 00:43:44,310
I got one farmer, Justin Arnett.

551
00:43:44,710 --> 00:43:47,870
He's a third, fourth generation cattle farmer.

552
00:43:48,310 --> 00:43:49,950
Real sweet brother to me.

553
00:43:49,950 --> 00:43:53,190
and he's a Bitcoiner now.

554
00:43:54,610 --> 00:43:57,510
And I spent a lot of time telling him,

555
00:43:57,650 --> 00:43:59,610
hey, people want clean beef.

556
00:43:59,870 --> 00:44:02,070
They don't want these black cows raised up like this.

557
00:44:02,070 --> 00:44:07,570
I've got customers that are willing to pay for unvaccinated beef.

558
00:44:08,590 --> 00:44:10,930
And so he pivoted his herd.

559
00:44:11,330 --> 00:44:14,050
And over the past three years, he's done a full pivot.

560
00:44:15,630 --> 00:44:19,330
But man, it is very expensive to raise cows like that.

561
00:44:19,950 --> 00:44:27,470
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?

562
00:44:28,110 --> 00:44:36,090
And, I mean, I pay, personally, I pay a lot more, you know, I pay probably $10 a gallon for milk.

563
00:44:36,530 --> 00:44:41,470
I think my family, there's six of us, we go through four gallons of milk a week.

564
00:44:42,070 --> 00:44:42,970
So what is that?

565
00:44:43,090 --> 00:44:46,030
You know, we have a $40 milk bill every week.

566
00:44:47,550 --> 00:44:48,770
$160 a month.

567
00:44:48,770 --> 00:44:59,090
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.

568
00:45:00,790 --> 00:45:05,410
But I just think about food differently, I guess.

569
00:45:08,850 --> 00:45:09,810
Man, I'm sorry.

570
00:45:09,930 --> 00:45:10,690
You get me on a roll.

571
00:45:10,850 --> 00:45:12,570
I'm just going to keep crambling here.

572
00:45:12,690 --> 00:45:16,390
I think about this stuff 24-7, $3 or $6, $5 a year.

573
00:45:16,390 --> 00:45:19,070
I don't know, Avi, who's going to be able to afford food.

574
00:45:19,450 --> 00:45:28,190
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,

575
00:45:28,830 --> 00:45:34,310
most small farms have no idea where their profit line is, whether they have one or not.

576
00:45:37,110 --> 00:45:37,550
Yeah.

577
00:45:38,130 --> 00:45:41,210
And how does Bitcoin factor into all of this?

578
00:45:41,210 --> 00:45:47,850
I know there's, you got in through the Beef Initiative and people can, in theory anyway, buy and sell.

579
00:45:48,230 --> 00:45:52,110
When you have these micro stores set up, buy and sell these goods and services with Bitcoin.

580
00:45:52,670 --> 00:45:58,630
Maybe something like you were talking about NOSTA, the RFID, maybe ZAP to unlock or something like that, right?

581
00:45:59,550 --> 00:46:03,070
But beyond that, like where does Bitcoin fit into all of this?

582
00:46:03,070 --> 00:46:15,350
yeah well um bitcoin uh in my specific story uh you know i i had you know i was familiar with

583
00:46:15,350 --> 00:46:19,870
bitcoin um you know like a lot of people have that story i heard about it here and there

584
00:46:19,870 --> 00:46:29,970
it was it was right uh i think in 2020 when i when i really started watching bitcoin started

585
00:46:29,970 --> 00:46:40,150
learning about Bitcoin and crypto in general. And, uh, and when the, when, when they announced

586
00:46:40,150 --> 00:46:47,670
the first stimulus checks, I'll never forget the national, the United States national used car

587
00:46:47,670 --> 00:46:57,010
report, um, jumped 30% in an hour and a half, uh, when they, when they announced, uh, uh, stimulus

588
00:46:57,010 --> 00:47:04,830
checks to the people. And so I just, I just, uh, I realized, okay, like this, this game is just

589
00:47:04,830 --> 00:47:11,150
going to crush us poors, you know? Um, so that was my, my real orange pill. I realized like,

590
00:47:11,150 --> 00:47:16,710
this is, this is something to, uh, solely focus on. Crypto is a scam. The, um, you know,

591
00:47:16,770 --> 00:47:21,130
the fiat world is going to eat, eat us all. Uh, we need, we need an escape.

592
00:47:21,130 --> 00:47:33,710
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.

593
00:47:35,130 --> 00:47:48,590
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.

594
00:47:48,590 --> 00:48:05,590
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?

595
00:48:05,590 --> 00:48:12,730
agriculture? No, I mean, just it was more about, you know, how is it being used in commerce here?

596
00:48:12,850 --> 00:48:19,170
And I think you answered it, right? Which is, I mean, you trade sats. You trade your goods and

597
00:48:19,170 --> 00:48:27,910
services for sats. Yeah. Yeah. So Ryan, you'd mentioned something to me about liberty fencing.

598
00:48:28,270 --> 00:48:33,090
You want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. So that would actually probably be

599
00:48:33,090 --> 00:48:38,150
where Bitcoin really kind of comes in.

600
00:48:38,690 --> 00:48:45,650
So we started Bitcoin Ranch as an LLC some years ago,

601
00:48:45,770 --> 00:48:47,950
and it was this farm services business.

602
00:48:48,590 --> 00:48:53,590
So we were going out, we were charging an hourly rate for services,

603
00:48:54,490 --> 00:48:56,390
and we just got obliterated.

604
00:48:56,390 --> 00:49:01,370
It's very difficult to make money off of farmers when farmers aren't making money.

605
00:49:01,370 --> 00:49:09,670
and um it's but it's sad you know we really wanted to help these guys so there was kind of a core

606
00:49:09,670 --> 00:49:15,590
group of us bitcoiners and we sat around and uh we were we were just discussing you know what we

607
00:49:15,590 --> 00:49:23,010
can do how we can go about this and we realized um that we needed to start a business uh uh a

608
00:49:23,010 --> 00:49:28,370
business that could make some money that we could stack some sats and the you know it would be great

609
00:49:28,370 --> 00:49:31,450
if that business complemented our farm services.

610
00:49:32,350 --> 00:49:35,350
So we ended up settling on fencing, Liberty Fencing.

611
00:49:35,350 --> 00:49:43,830
So Scott Parsons and I, we shook hands and we started this business together.

612
00:49:44,930 --> 00:49:55,170
And the idea was that we'd start a Bitcoin-based small services company on a Bitcoin standard.

613
00:49:55,170 --> 00:50:01,550
and we'd use AI and new technologies.

614
00:50:02,470 --> 00:50:04,750
We'd leverage as much as we could

615
00:50:04,750 --> 00:50:09,650
and try to build a fencing crew

616
00:50:09,650 --> 00:50:12,250
that could one day fence our own farms.

617
00:50:13,730 --> 00:50:15,650
And so anyway,

618
00:50:15,770 --> 00:50:17,610
so we've been doing that for about two years now

619
00:50:17,610 --> 00:50:22,850
and the way the attention split happened,

620
00:50:22,850 --> 00:50:28,630
I focus 80% of my energy on Liberty Fencing,

621
00:50:28,890 --> 00:50:31,950
and Scott focuses on the co-op and food distribution.

622
00:50:33,710 --> 00:50:37,890
And it's been a hard go, you know, starting a business.

623
00:50:38,590 --> 00:50:43,490
But this year, we're doing great.

624
00:50:43,670 --> 00:50:44,910
We've got a good crew working.

625
00:50:45,110 --> 00:50:46,910
They're working right now up in St. Louis.

626
00:50:46,910 --> 00:50:52,410
I rushed down here, abandoned them, to come record with you.

627
00:50:52,850 --> 00:51:20,810
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.

628
00:51:20,810 --> 00:51:28,190
well i mean you know you have farms you'll need fences right it's uh i think the

629
00:51:28,190 --> 00:51:36,690
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

630
00:51:36,690 --> 00:51:45,390
a small business uh developer and coach and um and he he's he's built a couple businesses on his

631
00:51:45,390 --> 00:51:52,710
own. And he is a real strong believer that the, the, the trades are going to be the only thing

632
00:51:52,710 --> 00:51:57,790
that's not going to get ate by AI and robotics real soon. And I don't know, I mean, maybe,

633
00:51:57,790 --> 00:52:04,090
maybe robots can install a fence or fix my plumbing, uh, here in the near future. But I

634
00:52:04,090 --> 00:52:09,330
think that's probably a little ways off. Um, although I'm really excited to get one of these

635
00:52:09,330 --> 00:52:15,090
robots to unload my truck. Like that's a, it's like 80% of our labor is like unloading and loading

636
00:52:15,090 --> 00:52:21,790
trucks. So as soon as we can, as soon as we can get some help there, that'd be great. But I think

637
00:52:21,790 --> 00:52:29,730
that small skill based businesses are probably the path for entrepreneurs and Bitcoiners in the

638
00:52:29,730 --> 00:52:34,730
future if you don't want to, if you don't want to get laid by the wayside. And so Scott and I,

639
00:52:34,730 --> 00:52:43,770
Scott is, is Scott's mature. He's retired. He's, he had a very full career in finance.

640
00:52:43,770 --> 00:52:47,790
He's sophisticated and understands how to build a business.

641
00:52:48,770 --> 00:52:55,930
So Scott and I had this idea that if you had a small business, even if it was a gutter

642
00:52:55,930 --> 00:53:06,230
cleaning business, and you treasured in Bitcoin, then you're going to have a certain percentage

643
00:53:06,230 --> 00:53:11,370
advantage against your neighbor competitor business that's cleaning gutters.

644
00:53:11,370 --> 00:53:14,390
Let's call it 10, 20, 30% per year.

645
00:53:15,450 --> 00:53:28,590
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,

646
00:53:28,970 --> 00:53:36,370
that's going to stack on top of whatever your Bitcoin gains would be over your competitors' fiat monopoly.

647
00:53:36,370 --> 00:53:58,390
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.

648
00:53:58,510 --> 00:54:01,650
And I mean, this is the case in every single small business.

649
00:54:02,370 --> 00:54:03,810
So for us, it's fencing.

650
00:54:03,810 --> 00:54:05,530
So we don't dig holes.

651
00:54:05,530 --> 00:54:08,890
We never dig holes when we build fences.

652
00:54:09,690 --> 00:54:16,050
We've invested in some great tools that let us pound everything in the ground.

653
00:54:16,150 --> 00:54:18,130
So we build steel fences.

654
00:54:18,530 --> 00:54:21,850
Even if we build a custom wood fence, the posts are steel.

655
00:54:22,270 --> 00:54:24,630
We drive them three to four feet in the ground.

656
00:54:24,750 --> 00:54:27,950
And then we build our fence systems on top of and around them.

657
00:54:29,410 --> 00:54:34,910
So I think those three things, like I said, if you're like a small business anywhere,

658
00:54:34,910 --> 00:54:37,650
doing carpentry

659
00:54:37,650 --> 00:54:39,390
and you use Bitcoin

660
00:54:39,390 --> 00:54:41,710
AI and robotics

661
00:54:41,710 --> 00:54:44,150
and then just have an open

662
00:54:44,150 --> 00:54:45,470
mind and try to be

663
00:54:45,470 --> 00:54:49,490
try to be nimble

664
00:54:49,490 --> 00:54:52,190
as the trades change

665
00:54:52,190 --> 00:54:53,230
over the next couple years

666
00:54:53,230 --> 00:54:57,890
I don't know of anything

667
00:54:57,890 --> 00:55:00,170
that would be

668
00:55:00,170 --> 00:55:01,130
a better investment

669
00:55:01,130 --> 00:55:03,210
of your SATs

670
00:55:03,210 --> 00:55:10,750
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.

671
00:55:11,670 --> 00:55:12,990
And yeah.

672
00:55:13,870 --> 00:55:21,630
How, you know, with the Bitcoin savings play, right now Bitcoin is a number go down technology mode.

673
00:55:22,610 --> 00:55:22,730
Yeah.

674
00:55:23,090 --> 00:55:25,730
How do you handle that?

675
00:55:26,890 --> 00:55:27,190
Yeah.

676
00:55:27,190 --> 00:55:27,550
Yeah.

677
00:55:28,110 --> 00:55:30,930
Well, I don't.

678
00:55:31,930 --> 00:55:32,690
Scott does.

679
00:55:33,240 --> 00:55:34,640
I build fences.

680
00:55:36,040 --> 00:55:41,920
And that's actually, I think, also another pretty awesome cheat code.

681
00:55:43,240 --> 00:55:46,620
I've always been told partnerships are the worst idea in the world,

682
00:55:47,040 --> 00:55:50,500
and I would usually be very partner adverse.

683
00:55:51,420 --> 00:55:54,500
But there's something about working with a Bitcoiner, you know?

684
00:55:55,060 --> 00:55:57,840
And Scott and I are 50-50 partners.

685
00:55:57,980 --> 00:55:58,980
We'll be partners forever.

686
00:55:59,180 --> 00:56:00,620
We're building Bitcoin Ranch together.

687
00:56:00,840 --> 00:56:02,060
We've got a 100-year plan.

688
00:56:03,240 --> 00:56:15,100
I think finding a Bitcoiner that you can build with is a huge, huge life hack.

689
00:56:16,540 --> 00:56:23,080
Scott and I just see the world differently than any other entrepreneur I ever interact with.

690
00:56:23,520 --> 00:56:33,120
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.

691
00:56:33,240 --> 00:56:39,980
that we're going to be able to raise cattle on land that's kind of been thrown by the wayside

692
00:56:39,980 --> 00:56:42,980
because corn and soybeans aren't subsidized in the same way.

693
00:56:43,520 --> 00:56:47,940
It just, yeah, so your question, how do we handle the drawdowns?

694
00:56:48,380 --> 00:56:49,620
I'm not exactly sure.

695
00:56:49,880 --> 00:56:51,340
Scott handles a lot of that.

696
00:56:51,900 --> 00:56:55,120
But I would say, you know, I mean, we have our savings,

697
00:56:55,640 --> 00:56:58,680
and our savings in dollars right now is a lot lower.

698
00:56:58,880 --> 00:57:00,200
I don't really care that much.

699
00:57:00,200 --> 00:57:05,640
We obviously, you know, we have cash flow and our cash flow pays our bills.

700
00:57:06,020 --> 00:57:10,460
And because we're both Bitcoiners, we're pretty debt and risk averse.

701
00:57:11,180 --> 00:57:12,560
So we grow slowly.

702
00:57:12,940 --> 00:57:14,000
We grow patiently.

703
00:57:15,220 --> 00:57:21,660
And yeah, I mean, hard times are going to come for all businesses.

704
00:57:21,660 --> 00:57:30,660
I think that we are – in thinking of like other local fencing companies, I think I'm probably the least worried.

705
00:57:31,840 --> 00:57:36,740
Well, you know, look, that is one way of dealing with drawdowns is not to look at them.

706
00:57:37,280 --> 00:57:37,700
They're happening.

707
00:57:40,820 --> 00:57:41,340
Great.

708
00:57:41,940 --> 00:57:46,260
Strike, I guess they had like a denial of service attack today.

709
00:57:47,300 --> 00:57:47,620
Oh, wow.

710
00:57:47,620 --> 00:57:54,520
But I opened StrikeUp and saw, I guess we're into the 60s.

711
00:57:55,060 --> 00:57:59,180
I'll tell you, I'm just like, man, where can I get money today?

712
00:57:59,940 --> 00:58:01,980
Where can I get some dollars?

713
00:58:03,840 --> 00:58:05,480
So we're recording this episode.

714
00:58:05,600 --> 00:58:09,180
It's probably when Bekhan is in the mid-60s.

715
00:58:09,880 --> 00:58:12,400
It'll probably be out a couple of weeks from now.

716
00:58:12,400 --> 00:58:17,080
So hopefully when the regular listeners of the podcast hear this episode,

717
00:58:17,080 --> 00:58:22,540
they can have a good laugh about this oh yeah that little drawdown back then um but ryan we're

718
00:58:22,540 --> 00:58:27,460
approaching the one hour mark uh so we'll we'll take a pause here for our open music

719
00:58:27,460 --> 00:58:36,700
uh segment and uh we're going to keep the wheels turning for this one uh so you know a lot of music

720
00:58:36,700 --> 00:58:42,620
i play on the show is about finding the signal about precision but sometimes you need a track

721
00:58:42,620 --> 00:58:44,060
for the journey itself.

722
00:58:44,200 --> 00:58:45,960
It feels like a bit of a wild journey.

723
00:58:46,580 --> 00:58:47,820
And this track is really fitting.

724
00:58:48,380 --> 00:58:50,460
This band is called The 54 Plates

725
00:58:50,460 --> 00:58:55,560
and the song Lost captures that specific feeling

726
00:58:55,560 --> 00:58:57,600
of driving down a highway at night,

727
00:58:58,180 --> 00:59:00,960
maybe without a destination, just clearing your head.

728
00:59:02,020 --> 00:59:04,400
It's got a great driving rhythm

729
00:59:04,400 --> 00:59:07,100
and a melody that just floats right on top of it.

730
00:59:07,200 --> 00:59:09,740
So if you're in your car as you're listening to this

731
00:59:09,740 --> 00:59:12,140
and you're able to laugh off that little dip you had

732
00:59:12,140 --> 00:59:14,720
two weeks back, then this is your soundtrack.

733
00:59:15,200 --> 00:59:17,080
It's time to get lost.

734
00:59:17,080 --> 00:59:47,060
guitar solo

735
00:59:47,080 --> 00:59:50,640
It's hard but it's not so damn true

736
00:59:50,640 --> 00:59:55,200
Are you lost and confused in your own present tense?

737
00:59:56,680 --> 00:59:59,700
Cushion myself with the darkness

738
00:59:59,700 --> 01:00:03,980
Almost comforting knowing it's there

739
01:00:03,980 --> 01:00:09,160
Piecing together like moments in time

740
01:00:09,160 --> 01:00:12,720
A montage of moments we share

741
01:00:12,720 --> 01:00:17,900
My God, you're stripping me, babe

742
01:00:17,900 --> 01:00:21,420
I've never been this last, baby

743
01:00:21,420 --> 01:00:25,600
I've never been this last, baby

744
01:00:25,600 --> 01:00:29,860
I've never been this last, baby

745
01:00:29,860 --> 01:00:33,360
I'm so last to you

746
01:00:36,360 --> 01:00:40,520
Who's under the influence tonight?

747
01:00:40,520 --> 01:00:44,520
Who's down by the carnival fair

748
01:00:44,520 --> 01:00:47,840
The colors we see

749
01:00:47,840 --> 01:00:50,120
The emergence of dreams

750
01:00:50,120 --> 01:00:53,300
And beauty is something we share

751
01:00:53,300 --> 01:00:57,540
My God, you're stupid, baby

752
01:00:57,540 --> 01:01:01,920
I've never been this last, baby

753
01:01:01,920 --> 01:01:06,100
I've never been this last, baby

754
01:01:06,100 --> 01:01:10,320
I've never been this last, baby

755
01:01:10,320 --> 01:01:14,080
I'm so lost to you

756
01:01:14,080 --> 01:01:18,700
I've never been this last baby

757
01:01:18,700 --> 01:01:22,860
I've never been this last baby

758
01:01:22,860 --> 01:01:27,020
I've never been this last baby

759
01:01:27,020 --> 01:01:30,520
I'm so lost to you

760
01:01:40,320 --> 01:02:10,300
guitar solo

761
01:02:10,320 --> 01:02:33,100
That was Lost by the 54 Plates.

762
01:02:33,340 --> 01:02:36,040
It's got such a great rolling energy to it.

763
01:02:36,040 --> 01:02:39,140
It's not aggressive, but it's insistent.

764
01:02:39,140 --> 01:02:44,920
It feels like motion. And I think there's a lesson in there for us. In the fiat world,

765
01:02:45,380 --> 01:02:50,080
being lost is a terrifying thing because you're running out of time. But in our world,

766
01:02:50,920 --> 01:02:57,640
the world of pioneers, sometimes getting lost is the only way to find the new edges of the map.

767
01:02:57,780 --> 01:03:05,000
And you have to wander a bit to discover the good stuff. So I've got 90% split set up for the band

768
01:03:05,000 --> 01:03:05,820
for this chapter.

769
01:03:06,360 --> 01:03:09,000
If that track was the perfect co-pilot

770
01:03:09,000 --> 01:03:11,420
for your week,

771
01:03:11,780 --> 01:03:14,660
then send the 54 Plates a boost.

772
01:03:15,820 --> 01:03:16,840
What do you think, Ryan?

773
01:03:17,620 --> 01:03:18,680
I liked it.

774
01:03:19,280 --> 01:03:22,300
I liked Beauty is Something We Share, man.

775
01:03:22,780 --> 01:03:24,160
That's the truth.

776
01:03:24,620 --> 01:03:24,920
Oh, yeah.

777
01:03:25,280 --> 01:03:27,120
I think they're a UK-based band.

778
01:03:28,520 --> 01:03:31,300
I might be getting this wrong,

779
01:03:31,300 --> 01:03:33,000
but I think it's the brothers,

780
01:03:33,000 --> 01:03:35,340
the Abbott brothers, Nathan Abbott,

781
01:03:35,500 --> 01:03:37,140
I forget the, Nolan?

782
01:03:37,400 --> 01:03:38,740
Yeah, Nolan and Nathan Abbott.

783
01:03:39,240 --> 01:03:40,060
I think it's them.

784
01:03:41,880 --> 01:03:44,460
Relatively new as well, if I'm not mistaken.

785
01:03:45,500 --> 01:03:46,920
But yeah, good stuff.

786
01:03:47,760 --> 01:03:51,400
All right, so let's talk about NOSTA for a bit here.

787
01:03:51,400 --> 01:03:56,400
Where does NOSTA come into this network?

788
01:03:56,980 --> 01:03:59,880
Or, you know, we talked about distribution a little bit.

789
01:03:59,880 --> 01:04:05,260
we talked about maybe the maybe somewhere with the bitcoin ranch for the for these breakfast

790
01:04:05,260 --> 01:04:12,720
meetups right where do you see nostril playing a role in what you do yeah i am man nostril is

791
01:04:12,720 --> 01:04:20,520
something that i i just think i get really excited about uh in waves so i i uh we i spent

792
01:04:20,520 --> 01:04:27,560
uh the last august in uh helsinki finland uh with a bunch of bitcoiners they're awesome over there

793
01:04:27,560 --> 01:04:28,800
It's actually where I met Tom.

794
01:04:29,460 --> 01:04:34,740
Tom and I had rolled around in the same circles for a long time, but it never actually met.

795
01:04:36,040 --> 01:04:42,960
And I, you know, Noster and BitChat were big deals in August.

796
01:04:44,000 --> 01:04:52,660
And when we came back here, I had this, I really had this vision to try to onboard like my local populace onto Noster.

797
01:04:52,660 --> 01:04:57,020
And so we actually had a small Bitcoin conference in September.

798
01:04:57,800 --> 01:05:04,720
And we, you know, we had some donors give us some sats for onboarding.

799
01:05:04,760 --> 01:05:10,300
And so we said we were going to give $10 of Bitcoin to 100 people who would download Primal.

800
01:05:11,660 --> 01:05:25,144
And you know I don think we got to 100 I would love to get more people onto Noster locally

801
01:05:25,984 --> 01:05:27,824
Locally is what I care about a lot.

802
01:05:27,904 --> 01:05:29,744
I was just talking to my wife about this the other day.

803
01:05:29,744 --> 01:05:32,804
And she's, my wife's, she's awesome.

804
01:05:33,284 --> 01:05:35,644
She isn't on any social media.

805
01:05:35,964 --> 01:05:37,824
Really, really hates technology.

806
01:05:38,044 --> 01:05:43,904
My poor kids, my poor kids are, they're allowed like a day of screen, you know,

807
01:05:43,904 --> 01:05:49,844
a screen time once a week and uh my 10 year old is allowed to play a little minecraft but

808
01:05:49,844 --> 01:05:56,404
i was talking to her about nostr and uh and and just how how different it feels to get off of

809
01:05:56,404 --> 01:06:01,944
twitter or facebook um and spend a little time on nostr it's more fulfilling you don't feel like

810
01:06:01,944 --> 01:06:10,844
an algorithm's got your got your throat um i'm not sure how to drive adoption we keep i keep

811
01:06:10,844 --> 01:06:15,764
taking swings at it and it's one of those things it's similar to bitcoin until you're on fire and

812
01:06:15,764 --> 01:06:21,644
you need it you realize how bad it is around you uh you might not be ready to take that jump

813
01:06:21,644 --> 01:06:30,164
but one thing that has me really excited right now is uh my local f3 group you maybe you saw this

814
01:06:30,164 --> 01:06:36,164
getting chatted about in a in a thread the other day um f3 nation i don't know if you've ever heard

815
01:06:36,164 --> 01:06:46,764
this. It's a, uh, it's a men's only, uh, workout club or group, um, that, uh, and, uh, they,

816
01:06:46,904 --> 01:06:52,784
they, they work out outside rain or shine, hot or cold early in the morning. And it's all,

817
01:06:52,904 --> 01:06:56,804
it's all over the world. Uh, you can find these, you know, you can look up F three nation and find

818
01:06:56,804 --> 01:07:04,084
one near you, but something special happened here in our town. Usually these, uh, these places,

819
01:07:04,084 --> 01:07:08,124
they'll have like maybe four or five guys who get together and work out.

820
01:07:08,904 --> 01:07:10,744
They're supposed to max out at like eight or 10.

821
01:07:11,604 --> 01:07:14,464
Here in my small town, we have 50.

822
01:07:15,424 --> 01:07:20,424
So every morning of the week, if you get up and you drive,

823
01:07:20,564 --> 01:07:23,704
you get up and get in your car at about 4.30 in the morning,

824
01:07:24,104 --> 01:07:26,444
there's a shocking number of guys on the road

825
01:07:26,444 --> 01:07:30,464
heading to three different locations where we meet

826
01:07:30,464 --> 01:07:34,724
and we have a 35-minute workout led by somebody in our peer group,

827
01:07:35,064 --> 01:07:37,224
and then we drink coffee afterwards and we fellowship.

828
01:07:38,884 --> 01:07:43,824
And so when this thing got started here this past year,

829
01:07:43,924 --> 01:07:47,124
I don't know what's in the water around us, but it just exploded.

830
01:07:47,404 --> 01:07:51,024
A lot of high-intentioned men wanted to get involved.

831
01:07:51,704 --> 01:07:56,444
And so now my brothers go, my dad goes, my best friends go.

832
01:07:56,444 --> 01:08:00,704
We got maybe six or seven Bitcoiners who go.

833
01:08:02,024 --> 01:08:11,264
And we slowly started to realize this might be an awesome opportunity to roll out something like Meshstastic and Noster.

834
01:08:12,644 --> 01:08:15,344
So it's actually, that was the conversation I was alluding to.

835
01:08:15,424 --> 01:08:16,964
I thought maybe that you had witnessed.

836
01:08:17,324 --> 01:08:24,744
I had plugged in with some of the Bitcoin veterans guys and just said, hey, and ironically, they're also an F3.

837
01:08:26,444 --> 01:08:27,644
On the other side of the country.

838
01:08:27,904 --> 01:08:30,584
So, you know, we all have our, we all have nicknames.

839
01:08:30,764 --> 01:08:31,744
I'm Fence Post.

840
01:08:32,164 --> 01:08:33,584
I was talking to Doge.

841
01:08:34,224 --> 01:08:38,044
And Doge, one of the Bitcoin veterans, he said, hey, I'd love to help.

842
01:08:38,424 --> 01:08:40,984
Let me send you guys a care package.

843
01:08:40,984 --> 01:08:52,504
So we're actually, we're going to try to deploy some type of Mesh-tastic system across our county at five different locations.

844
01:08:52,504 --> 01:09:06,024
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.

845
01:09:06,364 --> 01:09:09,604
And they're concerned about food and water and clean air.

846
01:09:10,284 --> 01:09:14,204
My hope is we can really scale something there.

847
01:09:14,204 --> 01:09:26,864
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.

848
01:09:27,324 --> 01:09:30,444
It's part of the problem of being a Bitcoiner.

849
01:09:31,084 --> 01:09:31,204
Yeah.

850
01:09:31,924 --> 01:09:35,224
Mesh-tastic or Noster on Mesh-tastic would be fantastic.

851
01:09:35,964 --> 01:09:41,244
But I want to go back to something you said earlier, right?

852
01:09:41,304 --> 01:09:42,984
By just doing the work, right?

853
01:09:42,984 --> 01:09:44,584
Let's, you know, heads down.

854
01:09:45,064 --> 01:09:48,144
If you, you know, it's not about doomerism.

855
01:09:48,304 --> 01:09:53,364
It's about if you have a way of fixing things, just put your head down and do it.

856
01:09:53,684 --> 01:09:53,944
Right.

857
01:09:54,004 --> 01:09:55,184
So you're doing that.

858
01:09:55,404 --> 01:09:57,584
You know, I'm doing what I do.

859
01:09:58,604 --> 01:10:03,944
And I think one way of getting people to use Noster is just make the work so compelling.

860
01:10:04,524 --> 01:10:04,764
Right.

861
01:10:05,304 --> 01:10:10,904
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.

862
01:10:10,904 --> 01:10:16,644
through the work you're doing through this through regenerative agriculture through

863
01:10:16,644 --> 01:10:20,944
homesteading whatever products and distribution channels you're setting up well the only way to

864
01:10:20,944 --> 01:10:24,864
get to me is through Noster and in my case whatever content whatever art I'm creating

865
01:10:24,864 --> 01:10:30,364
if you want to access one access to any of this stuff you got to come to Noster man and I think

866
01:10:30,364 --> 01:10:37,224
if more and more people do that those two things one focus on their craft right and just making

867
01:10:37,224 --> 01:10:42,784
the world a better place just through whatever they're good at right whatever they their their

868
01:10:42,784 --> 01:10:48,704
their reason for being on this planet right their purpose just focus on that do incredible things

869
01:10:48,704 --> 01:10:54,424
and then and then make it so compelling and then turn around and tell anyone who's who asks yeah

870
01:10:54,424 --> 01:11:00,684
yep gotta come to noster find me yeah no it's a great it's a great point you know and i

871
01:11:00,684 --> 01:11:08,524
it makes me think, you know, I think like the first commandment God gave humans was be fruitful.

872
01:11:09,824 --> 01:11:14,224
We usually say be fruitful and multiply. But I think the first one was be fruitful.

873
01:11:14,704 --> 01:11:19,324
And it's something my dad says all the time. It's just, I want to be productive and fruitful.

874
01:11:19,884 --> 01:11:25,544
And I think so many people's life energy is soaked up by whatever their fiat job is or

875
01:11:25,544 --> 01:11:31,984
by whatever, you know, clown world has their attention soaked up with that day.

876
01:11:33,464 --> 01:11:38,824
You know, these Epstein files probably be a pretty good place to dump a lot of wasted time and energy right now.

877
01:11:39,924 --> 01:11:44,564
And they don't get a chance to be productive and fruitful, you know.

878
01:11:44,564 --> 01:11:52,344
And I think about this a lot because I know the popular narrative is, you know,

879
01:11:52,344 --> 01:11:59,324
when if, if we had a really bad situation, things go down like Mad Max. I just don't think it's the

880
01:11:59,324 --> 01:12:06,284
case. I think the moment things got real, um, and, and we had to figure some stuff out, I think I

881
01:12:06,284 --> 01:12:11,744
would have, I would be surrounded by men whose time and energy isn't being soaked up by clown

882
01:12:11,744 --> 01:12:17,684
world anymore. And we'll, we'll fix it. We'll figure it out. You know, we'll be fruitful. We'll

883
01:12:17,684 --> 01:12:24,924
be productive. And maybe that's, maybe that's the way I should go. Maybe I need to go, uh, and,

884
01:12:24,924 --> 01:12:30,124
and go a hundred percent Noster. It's been difficult in this area because we're, uh, I

885
01:12:30,124 --> 01:12:36,324
specifically am pretty politically, uh, engaged. I've ran for office as a libertarian a couple of

886
01:12:36,324 --> 01:12:41,144
times for various things. And, um, you know, you kind of have to be out there and try to meet the

887
01:12:41,144 --> 01:12:46,784
people where they are. But frankly, man, it's getting to be such garbage. I mean, I can't even

888
01:12:46,784 --> 01:12:53,184
open Facebook without just feeling just sad and dark inside.

889
01:12:53,324 --> 01:12:55,844
These people are going to lose everything, you know?

890
01:12:57,444 --> 01:12:57,884
Yeah.

891
01:12:58,064 --> 01:12:59,044
So I'll let you.

892
01:12:59,104 --> 01:13:00,184
Maybe Noster's the way.

893
01:13:00,584 --> 01:13:03,984
So I'll let you and the folks on the live stream in on a little secret.

894
01:13:04,104 --> 01:13:08,704
I was going to talk about this in a couple of weeks,

895
01:13:09,504 --> 01:13:12,944
but that's when the episode's going to land anyway.

896
01:13:12,944 --> 01:13:16,144
so on X

897
01:13:16,144 --> 01:13:18,244
if you go to my X you'll see

898
01:13:18,244 --> 01:13:20,384
there's been a bunch of posts in the last week

899
01:13:20,384 --> 01:13:22,324
from my account talking

900
01:13:22,324 --> 01:13:24,004
about different things that's not me anymore

901
01:13:24,004 --> 01:13:26,064
man that is not me anymore

902
01:13:26,064 --> 01:13:27,764
I've trained an open claw

903
01:13:27,764 --> 01:13:30,264
and it's put it to work

904
01:13:30,264 --> 01:13:31,424
and it's doing its thing

905
01:13:31,424 --> 01:13:34,264
and I think that's exactly what that

906
01:13:34,264 --> 01:13:36,184
platform deserves it's a platform that's

907
01:13:36,184 --> 01:13:37,844
devolved into AI slop

908
01:13:37,844 --> 01:13:40,244
it will get the AI slop version of me

909
01:13:40,244 --> 01:13:48,164
hmm i like that a lot i like that a lot i i saw i think i think jeff booth has done something

910
01:13:48,164 --> 01:13:54,464
similar and yes it was inspired by it's really prodding yeah it's really prodding prodding me

911
01:13:54,464 --> 01:14:04,964
man i i um you know uh a bit of a rabbit trail but something that um something that texas slim

912
01:14:04,964 --> 01:14:05,964
Have you ever talked to Tex?

913
01:14:06,444 --> 01:14:07,584
I've not, no.

914
01:14:08,464 --> 01:14:11,024
Something Texas Slim told me really early on.

915
01:14:11,084 --> 01:14:12,484
I was filled with a lot of angst.

916
01:14:12,764 --> 01:14:22,244
I was still working this fiat job, you know, trading 70 hours of my week for paper printed by people who hated me.

917
01:14:23,124 --> 01:14:29,464
And Slim was here at the ranch, and he just kept saying, hey, you need to stop asking permission.

918
01:14:30,004 --> 01:14:31,784
You need to stop asking permission.

919
01:14:31,944 --> 01:14:32,604
You need to go do.

920
01:14:32,604 --> 01:14:49,584
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.

921
01:14:50,544 --> 01:14:53,864
I love that idea of just saying, hey, you know what?

922
01:14:53,904 --> 01:14:55,804
I'm out here being productive and building.

923
01:14:56,264 --> 01:14:58,184
If you want to see it, we're on Noster.

924
01:14:58,904 --> 01:15:12,008
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

925
01:15:12,168 --> 01:15:15,488
So I was in a not dissimilar boat, Ryan.

926
01:15:15,508 --> 01:15:17,708
And I've talked about this a few times on this podcast

927
01:15:17,708 --> 01:15:20,548
and then other podcasts where I've been a guest on,

928
01:15:20,648 --> 01:15:22,268
which is I was in a terrible fiat job.

929
01:15:22,268 --> 01:15:25,888
I was running an AI team at a horrible fiat company,

930
01:15:26,188 --> 01:15:28,548
like a large one, which I'm not going to name names.

931
01:15:29,168 --> 01:15:30,088
Everyone knows it.

932
01:15:30,088 --> 01:15:34,708
it's a horrible company and they hate that company and i was there i was running an ai team there

933
01:15:34,708 --> 01:15:41,928
and my life was miserable uh and i was like it was for the longest time it was almost as if i

934
01:15:41,928 --> 01:15:47,828
was waiting for someone to give me permission to quit yeah wait and and i joke i actually ended up

935
01:15:47,828 --> 01:15:53,128
writing a play about it uh called waiting for satoshi i was waiting for satoshi to set me free

936
01:15:53,128 --> 01:15:57,388
but i was like oh you know what i'm gonna quit when bitcoin is a million bucks that's the permission

937
01:15:57,388 --> 01:15:59,508
I need. And then my life

938
01:15:59,508 --> 01:16:01,368
got progressively miserable

939
01:16:01,368 --> 01:16:03,248
at work. I said, okay, you know what? Half a million.

940
01:16:03,788 --> 01:16:05,128
Then I said, okay, 250k.

941
01:16:05,468 --> 01:16:07,268
And at one point, I reached a point last summer

942
01:16:07,268 --> 01:16:09,368
where I said, whose permission am I

943
01:16:09,368 --> 01:16:11,368
waiting for? I'm just going

944
01:16:11,368 --> 01:16:13,468
to do it. Now, in today,

945
01:16:13,728 --> 01:16:15,068
regarding when we are today

946
01:16:15,068 --> 01:16:17,388
with a big, when I jumped,

947
01:16:18,028 --> 01:16:19,128
Bitcoin was over 100k.

948
01:16:19,188 --> 01:16:21,228
Now we're at 16, whatever we are.

949
01:16:21,668 --> 01:16:22,888
So I'm like,

950
01:16:22,888 --> 01:16:24,608
what do I do now?

951
01:16:25,108 --> 01:16:26,988
But having said that,

952
01:16:26,988 --> 01:16:33,328
zero regrets uh and and it all of that happened when i stopped waiting for satoshi's permission

953
01:16:33,328 --> 01:16:41,048
or whoever's permission i was waiting for to quit yeah man i i just experienced this so

954
01:16:41,048 --> 01:16:48,708
often lately that i i know what i need to do i don't need somebody to tell me i need to sit

955
01:16:48,708 --> 01:16:56,848
quietly for a while and then just go do it you know um and it is scary and i can't say that

956
01:16:56,848 --> 01:17:02,648
It's smart from a worldly point of view at all.

957
01:17:02,808 --> 01:17:04,828
I never should have quit my job when I did.

958
01:17:05,768 --> 01:17:14,348
But man, I just, when you feel the chains, you know, and you have an opportunity to walk

959
01:17:14,348 --> 01:17:17,548
away from them, walk away, walk away.

960
01:17:17,828 --> 01:17:18,748
We'll figure it out.

961
01:17:19,348 --> 01:17:21,308
And, you know, I'm a Christian.

962
01:17:21,308 --> 01:17:25,008
I do believe that there's a, you know, a divine plan.

963
01:17:25,008 --> 01:17:29,808
And I think that, you know, God takes care of every sparrow, every bird.

964
01:17:30,388 --> 01:17:40,068
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.

965
01:17:40,488 --> 01:17:44,988
You know, and that's not to say, by the way, that it has not been a hard couple of years.

966
01:17:45,188 --> 01:17:51,808
I mean, I've been down to the wire a couple times and, you know, gotten the bill notices in the mail.

967
01:17:51,808 --> 01:17:58,028
um just there's almost it's almost a process for me it's almost been a process of like

968
01:17:58,028 --> 01:18:08,488
i know that all whatever whatever money i had stacked prior was ill gotten and i just don't

969
01:18:08,488 --> 01:18:13,988
think satoshi and god were going to let me take any of that into the new world you know i i had

970
01:18:13,988 --> 01:18:20,468
to get all the way down and uh and then start stacking stacking in an ethical way yeah now's

971
01:18:20,468 --> 01:18:25,148
the time to double down man now is not the time to walk away and maybe i'm saying that more more

972
01:18:25,148 --> 01:18:33,568
to myself than to you right but now is not the time to walk away um no so let's before we we close

973
01:18:33,568 --> 01:18:39,828
out right let's uh go back and close the loop first on the denim road i don't think we fully

974
01:18:39,828 --> 01:18:47,448
defined the denim road so for our audience right like we've talked about this sort of nebulous

975
01:18:47,448 --> 01:18:52,908
notion of a mesh network, a human mesh network of nodes and whatnot. But really, like in simple

976
01:18:52,908 --> 01:19:01,028
terms, what is the Denim Road? Yeah. Well, I can tell you right now, I'll tell you a small part of

977
01:19:01,028 --> 01:19:11,248
the Denim Road is the Milkman Cooperative. And the Milkman is, you know, the St. Louis region's

978
01:19:11,248 --> 01:19:19,328
distribution route for local food. And it's all word of mouth. We've tried to automate it. We've

979
01:19:19,328 --> 01:19:22,788
tried to put it on Noster. We've tried to build a website. We've done a lot of different things.

980
01:19:23,928 --> 01:19:30,768
It's really hard to get away from shaking each other's hands, asking you, hey, do you have some

981
01:19:30,768 --> 01:19:35,688
eggs? No. Do you have any quail eggs? You know, I mean, you got to just kind of get through this

982
01:19:35,688 --> 01:19:42,428
nitty-grittiness. And so we have kind of a local milk route that runs, you know, probably

983
01:19:42,428 --> 01:19:53,268
60, 70 miles. And Augie and the KC crew has been working on this idea to really boost that up to

984
01:19:53,268 --> 01:19:57,328
the next level. I know they do a lot of food distribution on their side of the state. We

985
01:19:57,328 --> 01:20:01,888
aren't familiar with Missouri, Kansas City is on one side, St. Louis is on the other. We're about

986
01:20:01,888 --> 01:20:09,468
five hours apart. And so the idea of having regular couriers that are attending meetups

987
01:20:09,468 --> 01:20:16,848
across the state and able to move goods in somewhat of an anonymous way is really what

988
01:20:16,848 --> 01:20:23,008
Augie's focused on. And I love the idea. I just, I'm a technically retarded person,

989
01:20:23,368 --> 01:20:29,248
and I can't quite help with like the, you know, building out the platform side of that.

990
01:20:29,248 --> 01:20:33,268
but when it comes to finding the people and finding the products to move around,

991
01:20:33,808 --> 01:20:35,368
we have no shortage of it.

992
01:20:35,848 --> 01:20:37,668
And in the past couple of years, I have seen,

993
01:20:38,688 --> 01:20:43,408
so one thing that I left out was when I had quit my job,

994
01:20:43,568 --> 01:20:45,188
my wife and I were living in an apartment,

995
01:20:45,788 --> 01:20:48,048
and I had told her, hey, we need to get out.

996
01:20:48,488 --> 01:20:50,848
I don't know how crazy this pandemic is going to get,

997
01:20:51,128 --> 01:20:52,548
but we need to get onto a farm.

998
01:20:52,548 --> 01:21:01,928
and uh two or three weeks later i got introduced to this very wealthy local businessman who had

999
01:21:01,928 --> 01:21:08,888
this hay farm operation and it had an empty house sitting on it he was looking for a farm manager

1000
01:21:08,888 --> 01:21:14,768
so my wife and i moved out here so i actually live on this beautiful horse ranch and we we

1001
01:21:14,768 --> 01:21:21,508
operate as a hay farm we cut about a thousand acres of hay and my hay customers wouldn't you know

1002
01:21:21,508 --> 01:21:30,988
are all people fleeing the city trying to start little homesteads down here in the rural country.

1003
01:21:32,328 --> 01:21:38,528
And so I've just seen over the past three or four years so many homesteads and farms start up.

1004
01:21:39,068 --> 01:21:43,368
I'm like, I'm drowning in food and resources down here.

1005
01:21:43,368 --> 01:22:02,008
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.

1006
01:22:02,008 --> 01:22:05,988
I think we're going to need it

1007
01:22:05,988 --> 01:22:09,508
I think we're going to need a way to communicate

1008
01:22:09,508 --> 01:22:13,268
and trade outside of our

1009
01:22:13,268 --> 01:22:14,648
little locale

1010
01:22:14,648 --> 01:22:16,308
I'm just

1011
01:22:16,308 --> 01:22:22,108
right now we're all doing it as a hobby

1012
01:22:22,108 --> 01:22:25,468
and hopefully we get it figured out before we need to do it out of necessity

1013
01:22:25,468 --> 01:22:31,868
That time is not that far away

1014
01:22:31,868 --> 01:22:38,148
well hopefully well i mean no i don't think it is you know and um and and thankfully it's a lot of

1015
01:22:38,148 --> 01:22:46,648
fun you know i mean i i uh i i love finding farms and homesteads and uh spending time with people

1016
01:22:46,648 --> 01:22:51,048
who want to do things better whether it's here or in finland you know the beef initiative is working

1017
01:22:51,048 --> 01:23:01,348
in you know thailand and australia and south africa now i i uh i think that sometimes we do

1018
01:23:01,348 --> 01:23:09,628
feel probably a little bit lost. But when you zoom out and you take stock of, I mean, I don't know,

1019
01:23:09,728 --> 01:23:16,408
Avi, how long you've been seeking out raw milk, but at some point in the past, you didn't have

1020
01:23:16,408 --> 01:23:26,368
raw milk and now you do. And you can start stacking that. And eventually, you know, like I'm in like

1021
01:23:26,368 --> 01:23:27,648
a super blessed situation.

1022
01:23:27,648 --> 01:23:28,388
Like I told you,

1023
01:23:28,468 --> 01:23:30,008
I don't feel dystopian.

1024
01:23:30,468 --> 01:23:31,468
I feel very hopeful

1025
01:23:31,468 --> 01:23:32,248
because every night

1026
01:23:32,248 --> 01:23:33,168
when I sit down and eat,

1027
01:23:33,548 --> 01:23:35,108
I know where everything comes from.

1028
01:23:36,548 --> 01:23:37,968
But it's taken some years

1029
01:23:37,968 --> 01:23:39,188
to get there, you know?

1030
01:23:41,428 --> 01:23:42,368
Yeah, for sure.

1031
01:23:43,128 --> 01:23:44,048
Yeah, look,

1032
01:23:44,128 --> 01:23:46,688
there is lots to look forward to, right?

1033
01:23:46,788 --> 01:23:48,468
There's so many people like you,

1034
01:23:48,588 --> 01:23:49,028
like Augie,

1035
01:23:49,168 --> 01:23:51,428
like I had a couple of weeks back,

1036
01:23:51,428 --> 01:23:52,888
I had this guy who's building

1037
01:23:52,888 --> 01:23:54,868
an Uber and Lyft replacement,

1038
01:23:55,088 --> 01:23:56,148
Drivester and Rydester.

1039
01:23:56,368 --> 01:23:57,788
on NOSTA, right?

1040
01:23:57,868 --> 01:24:03,628
It's like there are people here on NOSTA especially, right?

1041
01:24:04,368 --> 01:24:06,748
They're bringing the cypherpunk values back.

1042
01:24:07,028 --> 01:24:08,008
They're actually building.

1043
01:24:08,588 --> 01:24:10,668
They're not just talking.

1044
01:24:11,648 --> 01:24:14,528
So there is a parallel system that we're building

1045
01:24:14,528 --> 01:24:16,468
and lots to look forward to.

1046
01:24:17,248 --> 01:24:19,548
Yeah, and so proud to be a part of it, man.

1047
01:24:19,668 --> 01:24:22,508
I mean, yesterday I was sitting in an, you know,

1048
01:24:22,548 --> 01:24:24,568
I was sitting talking to some friends of mine.

1049
01:24:24,568 --> 01:24:31,428
they're boomers and they just felt so hopeless. They're scared. They, this Epstein stuff is really

1050
01:24:31,428 --> 01:24:37,228
shaking them. You know, I mean, they're just like, is the world falling apart? And I'm like sitting

1051
01:24:37,228 --> 01:24:42,748
there with a smile on my face, like, yeah, heck yeah. And my friends are building a new one.

1052
01:24:42,968 --> 01:24:48,088
And I've been telling you, we've been building a new one for years. And, and, uh, and now I just

1053
01:24:48,088 --> 01:25:01,252
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

1054
01:25:01,752 --> 01:25:03,472
I had been suffering.

1055
01:25:03,912 --> 01:25:13,752
I've spent so much time and energy worrying about where my family would get food over the past years.

1056
01:25:13,752 --> 01:25:16,812
that this past year, 2025,

1057
01:25:17,072 --> 01:25:19,152
I was going to visit my wife's family in Finland.

1058
01:25:20,212 --> 01:25:22,932
And I was going to chip in

1059
01:25:22,932 --> 01:25:26,292
and try to help out with the first Nordic Bitcoin conference

1060
01:25:26,292 --> 01:25:26,972
while I was there.

1061
01:25:28,152 --> 01:25:29,772
And on my flight over,

1062
01:25:29,992 --> 01:25:31,672
I was like, my kids were sleeping.

1063
01:25:31,872 --> 01:25:34,192
I had this guilt sitting in my gut

1064
01:25:34,192 --> 01:25:38,732
because I realized back home in Farmington, Missouri,

1065
01:25:39,172 --> 01:25:40,512
no matter what happens,

1066
01:25:40,672 --> 01:25:42,052
we're going to do fantastic.

1067
01:25:42,492 --> 01:25:43,212
We've got food.

1068
01:25:43,292 --> 01:25:43,992
We've got water.

1069
01:25:44,912 --> 01:25:55,352
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.

1070
01:25:55,492 --> 01:25:56,592
You know, like, okay, what are we going to do?

1071
01:25:56,732 --> 01:25:59,912
You know, we just got hit with all this snow recently.

1072
01:26:00,372 --> 01:26:01,872
Dude, I've got such a network here.

1073
01:26:01,912 --> 01:26:02,352
I'm good.

1074
01:26:02,852 --> 01:26:08,852
But here I am on a plane flying halfway around the world, you know, to the border of Russia.

1075
01:26:08,852 --> 01:26:12,772
and I've got more family over there than I have here.

1076
01:26:13,412 --> 01:26:15,712
And I'm thinking, how am I going to feed them?

1077
01:26:16,412 --> 01:26:18,652
You know, like if something goes down and I'm over here,

1078
01:26:18,732 --> 01:26:21,972
how am I going to make sure that my kids don't eat the crickets, you know?

1079
01:26:22,672 --> 01:26:26,992
And so I just started to have this like, okay, all right, deep breath.

1080
01:26:27,052 --> 01:26:28,332
We got to do this all over again.

1081
01:26:28,472 --> 01:26:29,352
Let's go, you know.

1082
01:26:29,952 --> 01:26:31,632
And I get off the plane in Helsinki.

1083
01:26:32,012 --> 01:26:36,532
And again, I'm going to refer to my faith because I have this.

1084
01:26:36,532 --> 01:26:42,592
this, this was like a big moment for me where I, I, I get off the plane there and I start

1085
01:26:42,592 --> 01:26:47,692
looking at farms and visiting little stores and me and my nephew are driving around.

1086
01:26:48,412 --> 01:26:57,672
And, um, I, I drive to, I end up in Helsinki at the Bitcoin meetup. And, uh, I'm talking to one

1087
01:26:57,672 --> 01:27:04,752
of the guys organizing the, the, um, the conference and he off, he pulls out a bag of,

1088
01:27:04,752 --> 01:27:10,632
of beef bits, Bitcoin beef bits. And he goes, Hey, I've got this product we want to try.

1089
01:27:11,292 --> 01:27:16,952
Um, I got this butcher in town and I just, two weeks ago, I walked in with an S 19 and I asked

1090
01:27:16,952 --> 01:27:22,792
him, Hey, can you make jerky out of this? And my Bitcoin friends will go nuts over it. And the guy's

1091
01:27:22,792 --> 01:27:29,152
like, hold my beer. And so they make this product. It was, I try it, you know, it's like, you know,

1092
01:27:29,152 --> 01:27:34,072
it's an early product. It's probably a little overly crunchy, but it's cool. You know, I meet

1093
01:27:34,072 --> 01:27:42,552
this butcher at the conference. And this guy is our brother, Avi. I mean, this guy, God has had

1094
01:27:42,552 --> 01:27:51,932
him over there working on building a food supply for the past 10 years. In 2011, this guy started

1095
01:27:51,932 --> 01:27:57,432
on the venture that I felt God put me on just a couple of years ago. And he's got a store in

1096
01:27:57,432 --> 01:28:04,332
Helsinki and it has fresh milk and it has pastured eggs and it has good beef. It has all of this

1097
01:28:04,332 --> 01:28:09,392
stuff, you know? And he's telling me this and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is only 40 minutes away

1098
01:28:09,392 --> 01:28:14,532
from where my wife grew up. You know, like, look at, I had so much stress and concern about what

1099
01:28:14,532 --> 01:28:19,452
was going to happen. And this has just been taken care of, man. Like all the work I put in back in

1100
01:28:19,452 --> 01:28:25,032
Farmington and we're not even close to what this guy has here in Helsinki. Amazing. And he's a

1101
01:28:25,032 --> 01:28:27,312
And I tell him, and he's a Bitcoiner.

1102
01:28:27,712 --> 01:28:29,892
Well, no, he wasn't a Bitcoiner.

1103
01:28:30,792 --> 01:28:38,332
He, you know, a Bitcoiner, my buddy, brought that S19 in and he was like, okay, he made

1104
01:28:38,332 --> 01:28:39,552
the product, Bitcoin Beef Bits.

1105
01:28:39,992 --> 01:28:44,792
And then they brought him to the conference and he told the butcher, he told me, he goes,

1106
01:28:45,352 --> 01:28:50,052
I came here to this Bitcoin conference and I realized all of my customers are Bitcoiners.

1107
01:28:50,052 --> 01:28:56,092
like all of his normal customers looking for based food were Bitcoiners.

1108
01:28:56,152 --> 01:28:57,152
And he's seen with this Bitcoin conference.

1109
01:28:57,232 --> 01:28:58,132
So now he's a Bitcoiner.

1110
01:28:58,392 --> 01:28:59,612
So he and I are like,

1111
01:28:59,692 --> 01:29:02,612
we're talking and I'm sharing with him like this,

1112
01:29:02,832 --> 01:29:04,272
what I just shared with you that like,

1113
01:29:04,332 --> 01:29:04,472
Hey,

1114
01:29:04,512 --> 01:29:07,252
I feel like you were an answer to my prayer,

1115
01:29:07,512 --> 01:29:07,832
you know?

1116
01:29:08,312 --> 01:29:09,172
And I said,

1117
01:29:09,192 --> 01:29:13,792
I would love to get my family from Kierkegaardome and bring them here sometime.

1118
01:29:14,132 --> 01:29:14,652
And he goes,

1119
01:29:14,732 --> 01:29:15,232
Kierkegaardome,

1120
01:29:16,072 --> 01:29:17,092
that's where I live.

1121
01:29:17,532 --> 01:29:18,092
I said,

1122
01:29:18,212 --> 01:29:18,432
what?

1123
01:29:20,052 --> 01:29:22,832
He goes, yeah, what's your wife's last name?

1124
01:29:23,852 --> 01:29:26,332
He ended up having gone to school with my wife's brothers.

1125
01:29:26,652 --> 01:29:27,092
No way.

1126
01:29:27,432 --> 01:29:29,192
He knew my family, bro.

1127
01:29:29,632 --> 01:29:31,312
I'm getting chills right now telling you this.

1128
01:29:31,552 --> 01:29:35,172
His farm was right around the corner from where my wife grew up.

1129
01:29:35,172 --> 01:29:36,192
Oh, my God.

1130
01:29:37,332 --> 01:29:39,052
Divine synchronicities, man.

1131
01:29:40,152 --> 01:29:40,872
Synchronicity, man.

1132
01:29:41,112 --> 01:29:41,412
Amen.

1133
01:29:42,692 --> 01:29:43,132
Amazing.

1134
01:29:43,392 --> 01:29:44,152
So we're going to be all right.

1135
01:29:44,452 --> 01:29:46,672
All my friends are building a brand new world, bro.

1136
01:29:46,872 --> 01:29:47,512
Praise God.

1137
01:29:48,732 --> 01:29:49,492
That is true.

1138
01:29:49,492 --> 01:30:11,852
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?

1139
01:30:11,852 --> 01:30:21,712
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

1140
01:30:21,712 --> 01:30:29,192
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

1141
01:30:29,192 --> 01:30:34,612
and i'm also on twitter i mean those are those are the two places if i ryan cooper 116 so ryan

1142
01:30:34,612 --> 01:30:36,152
Cooper116 is me on Twitter.

1143
01:30:37,692 --> 01:30:42,832
And yeah, we would love to connect with more Bitcoiners.

1144
01:30:42,912 --> 01:30:48,052
We're planning to do a, so we do a small Bitcoin conference here once a year,

1145
01:30:48,152 --> 01:30:50,212
a small homesteading conference here once a year.

1146
01:30:50,392 --> 01:30:54,972
And May 1st, we're actually going to do our first communications conference.

1147
01:30:57,772 --> 01:31:00,612
My dad, I told you he started this farm.

1148
01:31:01,152 --> 01:31:02,832
He's been working on it for the past couple of years,

1149
01:31:02,832 --> 01:31:06,492
and he just bought, it's 150 acre regenerative farm.

1150
01:31:07,272 --> 01:31:09,632
Everything you can imagine that would be regenerative

1151
01:31:09,632 --> 01:31:10,272
is out there.

1152
01:31:10,972 --> 01:31:13,812
And he just bought the golf course that's right next to it.

1153
01:31:13,852 --> 01:31:17,992
So now it's going to be somehow a regenerative farming

1154
01:31:17,992 --> 01:31:19,192
golf course.

1155
01:31:20,152 --> 01:31:21,852
But that's where we're going to have it.

1156
01:31:21,932 --> 01:31:25,952
May 1st, Farmington, Missouri, Cherrywood Golf Course

1157
01:31:25,952 --> 01:31:26,872
and Farm.

1158
01:31:27,512 --> 01:31:30,012
We're going to have a comms conference.

1159
01:31:30,012 --> 01:31:36,832
And we'd like to launch a lot of this NOSTA and MeshStastic type theory in this area from that.

1160
01:31:37,392 --> 01:31:37,832
Love it.

1161
01:31:37,992 --> 01:31:40,152
Yeah, probably find me on Twitter, RyanCooper116.

1162
01:31:40,732 --> 01:31:41,032
Awesome.

1163
01:31:41,272 --> 01:31:45,832
I'll put your NOSTA link and your Twitter link in the show notes.

1164
01:31:46,512 --> 01:31:47,812
What about Nakamoto?

1165
01:31:48,092 --> 01:31:49,832
You're not involved in that, are you?

1166
01:31:50,652 --> 01:31:51,972
No, no, I'm not.

1167
01:31:53,972 --> 01:31:57,732
You're talking about the Kansas City plan for next October.

1168
01:31:57,732 --> 01:31:58,052
Yeah.

1169
01:31:58,052 --> 01:32:00,152
Super excited about that.

1170
01:32:01,112 --> 01:32:02,932
And we'll definitely be out there.

1171
01:32:03,672 --> 01:32:06,432
The Bitcoin Ranch will have a heavy presence.

1172
01:32:06,552 --> 01:32:07,972
We'll make sure to come over.

1173
01:32:08,792 --> 01:32:09,312
Yeah.

1174
01:32:10,172 --> 01:32:13,252
Anytime people want to visit America, you should come to Missouri.

1175
01:32:13,692 --> 01:32:16,292
Missouri is one of the best kept secrets of this country.

1176
01:32:16,532 --> 01:32:17,872
We say it's the new Texas.

1177
01:32:18,972 --> 01:32:21,992
And I'm ashamed to say, Ryan, I've never been.

1178
01:32:22,332 --> 01:32:25,732
Either to Kansas City or to Farmington or to St. Louis.

1179
01:32:25,732 --> 01:32:28,912
to the beautiful state of Missouri.

1180
01:32:29,052 --> 01:32:31,372
I have not been, and I need to rectify that.

1181
01:32:32,192 --> 01:32:33,872
Yeah, it's shockingly beautiful.

1182
01:32:35,972 --> 01:32:39,232
I'm telling you, it's a secret, the best-kept secret.

1183
01:32:39,372 --> 01:32:41,332
Come visit Bitcoin Ranch. We'd love to have you, Avi.

1184
01:32:41,592 --> 01:32:44,352
Awesome. That is a plan.

1185
01:32:44,352 --> 01:32:46,732
I will plan to be there with my family.

1186
01:32:47,012 --> 01:32:52,432
All right. Well, Ryan, thank you for educating me and the audience

1187
01:32:52,432 --> 01:32:55,212
on all this amazing stuff that you're doing.

1188
01:32:55,732 --> 01:33:00,972
It's really exciting to think of where this is going to be a year from now, right?

1189
01:33:00,972 --> 01:33:07,412
If you and everyone else who are so committed to bringing this vision to life continues,

1190
01:33:07,572 --> 01:33:09,252
and no reason why you won't.

1191
01:33:10,292 --> 01:33:12,612
So, yeah, great stuff.

1192
01:33:12,892 --> 01:33:13,612
Thank you, Ryan.

1193
01:33:13,892 --> 01:33:17,412
And thank you to our live stream audience for listening.

1194
01:33:17,832 --> 01:33:23,152
If you are listening to this recording, as always, notice what you didn't hear today.

1195
01:33:23,152 --> 01:33:33,212
You didn't hear me pushing a sports betting app designed to drain your savings, and you didn't hear a script for a credit card with 25% APR.

1196
01:33:33,672 --> 01:33:34,892
I don't do that here.

1197
01:33:35,292 --> 01:33:39,512
On the Lightning Laced Airwaves, the only sponsor is you.

1198
01:33:40,072 --> 01:33:50,652
If you found value in this conversation, if it gave you a new mental model, a moment of clarity, or just a respite from the noise, then please consider returning the value.

1199
01:33:50,652 --> 01:33:56,932
you can stream stats as you listen on fountain or you can become a monthly subscriber to keep the

1200
01:33:56,932 --> 01:34:05,392
signal strong but for those who want to shape the show the mic is open whether you want to ratify

1201
01:34:05,392 --> 01:34:12,152
the sermon with your own story or rectify it with the counterpoint the executive producer slot

1202
01:34:12,152 --> 01:34:19,392
is waiting for you the minutes are open for next week until then stay sovereign

1203
01:34:20,652 --> 01:34:50,632
Thank you.
