Ep 227: How to Actually Live Free: Self Governance, Parallel Communities & Bitcoin with John Bush

I came to realize that all of this political effort was merely slowing the growth of tyranny, yelling at government buildings, getting all angry, protesting, voting, really was not satisfying my desire to experience true freedom. We're trying to create some rebel alternative systems here, a parallel economy. The things that defy the government when people say anarchism doesn't work, it's actually working right now in this global decentralized anarchist network. There's no hierarchy. The overwhelming majority of people that I know who talk about Bitcoin don't use it in the initial value proposition of peer-to-peer money transfer without any third party. There was a sigh I'll commonly known as the hijacking of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was growing so much that there wasn't enough data space in each block to include it in the next block on the blockchain. How is this going to pan out in an anarchist institution? Here's where Epstein comes in. Mr. John Bush, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I stoked for this man. Yeah. So I want to open up this conversation. We're going to be getting into crypto and Bitcoin a lot, and I'm probably going to start when we start that piece of the conversation with you explaining Bitcoin and crypto to me like I'm a five-year-old because I'd love to. I have an issue still, no matter how many times I have conversations about this. I've featured a few on this podcast. I get it to some degree, but I still just cannot wrap my head around it fully. And I have a goal now. I have a mission. Yes, a mission. I'm sure a lot of people that are listening or watching this have share those same sentiments. So it'd be good to have that explained like four five-year-olds. I'm your guy. Cool. But before we get there, I love for you to just share your journey into originally like the sort of activism work that you did. And your journey into starting with libertarianism, moving on to volunteerism, anarcho-capillism, anarchism. Let's start there. Rock and roll. Okay, so I was born in Austin, Texas, which is quite the hub for conspiracy. And I was a bit of a rabble rouser all throughout school, getting in trouble. Even started a group called the student anarchist front. I didn't know what anarchist was though. In high school. Yeah. No way. To protest the tardy table. Really? Yeah, as this policy, or even if you're like 10 seconds late, they close the door. They give you a detention. You got to do detention. So we organized a big protest. And then we actually got in trouble because the protest was going to happen shortly after Columbine happened, which was one of the first big mass shootings. And the principal pulled us in and was like, your punishment is going to depend on how many people show up. So we kind of got spooked. Looking back, I wish we'd been like, this is all right. Yeah. As Americans. But anyway, so yeah, I was always a bit of a rebel. And then in early 2002, shortly after 9/11, I caught a documentary by old Alex Jones, who I used to hold in very high regard. I think something's going on there for a while now. We got a show respect, where respects do. And he did wake a lot of people up. He did. And so caught 9/11, wrote a tyranny on cable access because he's from Austin too or lives in Austin. And that was a big eye opener. That brought me down the rabbit hole of conspiracy research. Council informed relations, trial out our commission, annoyed the crap out of my family. And all my friends about the world's going to crash down and the new world orders coming. And then, when is this again? 2002. So I've been at it for a while, one and a half my adult life, which has given me quite a bit of perspective and patience. And I'm recognized now like the bottom's not going to drop off any day. They have a long term. It's slow drip. Slow drip. Gradualism. But then I went to college, learned about the Constitution, had a reverence for the Bill of Rights, started an American Civil Liberties Union chapter, Texas State. Thought I was a Democrat because I was against the war and George Bush. And then Pelosi voted for John Kerry. Then Pelosi and the Democrats took control of the House and the Senate. And they said they were going to defund the Iraq war, but then they just voted for more funding. That's when I started to see through the left right paradigm. And then along came the good Dr. Ron Paul and I participated heavily in his campaign 2007, 2008. So you saw the corruption within the RNC at that point as well. Yeah, I was a delegate to the Texas Convention, the Texas Republican Convention. So you were really involved. I was deep. Wow. I mean, we went deep. We had a local crew here and we were organizing block walking and all sorts of stuff. So I know a lot of people, his campaign in 2012 is woke up a lot of people when the RNC ended up choosing Mitt Romney when it was very clear that the majority of the people who were quote unquote Republicans, liberty minded people did not want Mitt Romney. They wanted to Ron Paul. Well, it's all a giant sign up. There was even some sighoperie within the Ron Paul campaign. Really? Yeah, there was like a corporate, there was the grassroots and then there was the corporate Ron Paul campaign, the official campaign. And part of their thing was to restore the Republican party back to its roots. And in all honesty, my take on it being pretty intimately involved was that the 2012 campaign was more about collecting a giant list for the benefit of getting Rand Paul in office rather than actually winning. Interesting. And that's great. Political. It's a game. We play politics. It's a game and the Ron Paul faction and their family dynasty played the game well. And now we have Rand Paul in the Senate who's doing great work. Thomas Massey too. I actually was in a super PAC. I didn't play an intimate role in this aspect, but I was in a super PAC that helped get Thomas Massey elected. Really? You know James Metaphico? Yeah, I love James. James is the man. Oh, I saw James post about that the other day. Yeah, he played an intimate role. He co-founded it with his guy named John Ramsey. Anyway, after that, we started a political action committee called Texans for accountable government. We did a lot of political activism at the local level. We stopped police officers from being trained to do blood withdrawals on the side of the road in Austin. We pushed back on the fusion center, which is this Department of Homeland Security information gathering, intelligent sharing system. It's just big brother. Now it's just spread. Rand Paul push back on that, instituted all these city privacy policies and then even a state law that I helped to author got passed. And we would do all sorts of lobbying at the state capital. But I came to realize slowly but surely, in part, the mother of my kiddo is back in the day. She was a little more radical that all of this political effort was merely slowing the growth of tyranny. It wasn't creating real freedom. That's when I got into alternative institutions as we used to call it. And even before I learned about Bitcoin and crypto, we were encouraging farmers, market vendors to accept silver dimes and precious metals. And so homesteading, doing a community garden, later came up with the idea for the Freedom Cell Network. And Derek Brosden, I collaborated to turn that into a big global movement. And yeah, I just really shifted my perspective. I recognize that yelling at government buildings, getting all angry, protesting, lobbying, voting really was not satisfying my desire to experience true freedom. And now fast forward have gone even deeper into this whole parallel institutions, counter economics. And in spite of what seems to be the most tyrannical and technocratic age that I've ever lived in, right, I've never felt more free. A lot of it has to do with mindset and spiritual side as well. So yeah, for sure. Yeah, been at it for a while and just has a lot of perspective on best strategies, really. You know, it's interesting because a lot of people in the freedom movement still sort of adopt that approach that you had initially taken, where the best way to obtain freedom, like for example, the Maha movement. I'm not I'm not dogging on everyone that's a part of the Maha movement. I'm not that's not the point of this. But there's so much focus on getting legislation passed at the federal level, like related to food, dyes and things like this. I'm not saying there isn't a place for someone doing something like that. But when I look at the real world results, for example, with what happened with executive order regarding glyphosate recently. And there is so much push, so much energy from the freedom and health movement towards getting restrictions on glyphosate. And now the exact opposite is happened. It's like totally protected as a national security thing. Right. Who would have thought? Who would have not like I sat here with Derek Bros. And it's not like you haven't spoken about this ad nauseam for the last few years or anything like that. But when you see that, like what is your response to seeing people sort of taking that approach that you tried? I mean, you were deeply involved. And yes, some things did happen. But now you sort of step back and it's like, is that really achieving anything in the long term? And do I feel more free doing it? I think a lot of it comes down to an abrogation of our power and responsibility. And that's why I appreciate your message about remembering who we are and the creative capacity. Like I've deepened my relationship with Christ in recent years, especially last year. But this whole idea that we're made in the image of God and God is the creator of the universe. That necessarily means that we have this innate creative capacity that unfortunately, a lot of people have forgotten or they never learned. And there's like this learned helplessness in society and culture. But I think, because I think about this all the time, because my company lived for Academy, we trained people and helped people to exit and build. Exit the B system, build new systems, live free now. And we're doing these courses and webinars and people are joining them. But there's a bunch of people that watch the free webinar or read the email, smaller number of people that join a course. And then there's an even smaller number of people that actually implement what they're learning. And so I'm constantly trying to adjust how can I best serve my audience, my community, and one of the, and I'm always asking questions, why aren't more people doing what I strongly believe is the way? I think there's enough people that woke up. I saw this with the 2008 round-pull campaign. There's enough of us that believe in freedom if we simply shifted our strategy away from a reactionary paradigm of fighting against the system and voting and expecting government to do the right thing, all of a sudden, to taking responsibility for creating these new systems and supporting those that are creating new systems, we could experience liberty in our lifetime. So why don't we? I think a big part of it has to do with, it takes work. I mean, to grow food from seed to fruit, to learn a new technology like cryptocurrency, to go out of your comfort zone and strike up a conversation with somebody wearing a freedom like shirt or to organize a meet-up only for nobody to show up, only for two people to show up, start to feel insecure. It's just a lot of work and hard to do. It's beyond people's comfort zone. It's a lot easier to put your hope and faith in another human being to solve those problems. And then I'm going to fault anybody. We're all busy. We got life and hardship and struggle and making ends meet and all that jazz too. But I mean, what's more important than preserving this flame of freedom for future generations? Hey, man. Yeah, so I'll say it. I'm glad that list of things that you just mentioned, dissolving limited beliefs inside yourself, nutrition beliefs because I think beliefs, thoughts and feelings are not only the things that inform our words and actions, but they like may have a causal aspect to themselves and that's a whole separate conversation. That's your stick. That's my whole stick right now. Yeah. And I mean, when we look at mass, like a genitalist, mass social contagion and this is very easy. Come on. There's a lot of indication towards that. There really is. And at the very least, people can recognize that they definitely inform your actions or inactions in the world and the way that you think and speak on a daily basis. And then another piece is like the whole legal slash law realm too. Track yourself from the various contractual relationships primarily through tacit agreements that we've involved ourselves in with the state. So the whole point is it's like what the way I see it is over the course of I don't know how long we as a society as a collective have been conditioned into what's called the Carpman drama triangle. As an example, with the large part of the freedom movement over the last few years, you look at the persecutors as let's say the New World Order and the liberals, the Democrats, Obama, Biden, Kamala Harris, and then you look at yourself as the victim in that relationship and then you look at Trump as the rescuer. And we're constantly caught up in this triangle where we're making ourselves the victim and then we're needing someone outside of us to come save us. And the whole movement that you and Derek have done such an incredible job with and I'd like to think that I'm sort of falling in your guys' footsteps with my own flavor, but like you guys paved the way and so did so many other people in the sort of voluntary space. But is we're stepping out of that triangle altogether. It's like that triangle exists. It's a part of this burning building. We don't want to sit inside the burning building and try to fix the burning building nor do we want to sit just away from the burning building a little bit and constantly point towards the burning building. It's like, okay, we're aware of the burning building now. Let's step away from it. Share about it a little bit. Hey, don't go near that burning building to people that are in our audience, but let's start building new buildings. So let's just like get away from it altogether. And that's kind of what I see people like you and myself and Derek and others as our role is what we're doing is educating people on like we don't even need to be a part of that building anymore. I appreciate the recognition, brother, because I think it's important and I think a lot of people don't see that there's an alternative. And so one of the best things that we can do, people that see the triangle as a as a fougazi fake phony, sia, the best thing we could do is like show folks there's another way. So it's like you don't have to involve yourself in that scheme. There's other things that we could do. Here's what we're doing and here's a great quality of life and here's the fruit from that. And you know, the whole victim piece is just so so powerful in all aspects of life, especially relationships and hardship and struggle. And so I've always taught folks like to step out of victimhood and into empowerment. And the more that you stay in victimhood, the less power you have over your own circumstances. And it's always there's this great quote from Napoleon Hill that I really lean on within every adversity lies the seat of an equal or greater benefit. So COVID happened. And of course, people that were quote unquote awake were like it was all victimhood. They're coming the world economic forum. That's why we came up with the greater reset. Now the people's reset. It was like, well, everyone's just talking about it and sharing articles about the great reset. It's obviously a problem. Why don't we have a greater reset or now of people's reset? It's our vision for the future. Yeah. And folks like instead of being a victim about all this technology and they shut down the economy and maybe people lost their jobs, instead we could flip the script and say, I am grateful that I get to be alive in this time and contributes to a shift in humanity's path away from dependence and towards independence away from centralization and towards decentralization. So it's all a perspective and I'm listening to Jaco Wilkes extreme ownership again. And Grant Cardone talks about one of the characteristics of successful people is taking ownership and responsibility. So I like to think that we attract everything in our lives and it actually gives us our power back to take responsibility for the role that we play even in the negative things that happen in our world. Very well said, man. I couldn't agree more. Very well said. If you frequently tune into the Wayford podcast, don't skip this one. This is personal. If you've ever felt a shift from something that you've heard in this podcast, if it's helped you to see things more clearly, if it's helped you to break down a limiting belief system, if it's helped you just to generally question, or if it's helped you to feel less alone, then I'm asking you from my heart to help us keep going. We're not backed by corporate sponsors venture capital money or big donors and that has been a deliberate choice. And we've said no to a lot of ad deals that weren't aligned because we don't want our mission to be shaped by products, brands and agendas that we don't actually believe in. 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The Wayford.com is a private membership platform that allows you to instantly connect with aligned people, practitioners, farms, schools, restaurants and more in your local area. And if the platform isn't for you, we've added a donation option as well. You'll find both of those and the show notes. If you've received something from the show, please consider giving back by becoming a member so we can continue to reach people. Not just as a podcast, but as a movement for something good, true and beautiful. Thank you so much for tuning in and thank you for walking this path with us. On giving people alternative solutions as a good segue, I want to talk about crypto. So now I'm going to ask you with both Bitcoin and with just the whole crypto space, which is a very broad question. It's like asking, what is the internet? But with that, explain it to me like I'm a five year old. All right, little friends. Here's what we're going to do today. Okay. No. All right. So let's just start with what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin was the very first cryptocurrency. And it was a huge innovation in information sharing essentially. Okay. So what is Bitcoin? There were some problems to solve. Centralization and double spending. So a great way to illustrate what Bitcoin is. I recently was looking for a new office for my business. And I went to downtown Bastrop. I always dreamed of having an office in a downtown small town. And there was a bank. It was like first national bank or first Chase Bank or something. And I go in like this would be cool to have an office in a bank. And it was preserved because it's like a historic marker. It's been there since the 1880s or something. And I go in and I'm looking at the office and I see that they have these ledgers. There's these ledgers. It was actually real thick old school books that contained a collection of people's accounts. And it had debits and credits. Money coming out and money coming in. And you open it up and you see all of these entries. And I thought to myself like wow, this is like an old school version of what Bitcoin and blockchain technology improves. But the challenge with maintaining this ledger here at the Chase National Bank or whatever it was is that we have to trust them to maintain it. And as history has shown, we can't really trust banks. They're pretty corrupt. And of course the Federal Reserve is a giant bank that could creates money out of thin air and funds, foreign wars of aggression, and all sorts of ugliness. So essentially what the blockchain is, which is a foundational piece of Bitcoin technology, and a great innovation that one of these cypherpunk characters likely created, it takes that ledger and it distributes it in tens of thousands of computers across the world, different countries, different people, different reasons why they're participating in the network. - And it can't be manipulated. It can't be changed, it can't be manipulated. All of that information is kind of frozen through this function called hashing. Okay, so every time a transaction takes place, over about 10 minutes or so, it gets added to the Bitcoin blockchain, which is the decentralized distributed public ledger. Here's how it can't be scammed or double spent. So let's say you set up a crypto wallet and you wanna send some Bitcoin to me. That would be your address sending this much Bitcoin to this address. When that transaction takes place, it goes into what's called the memory pool. That's all the transactions that are just recently taken place that are yet to be confirmed and added to the Bitcoin blockchain and preserved in history through this immutable blockchain. Can't be changed, that's what immutable means. Okay, so there's all these transactions waiting to take place. Who gets to add those transactions and verify their authenticity that they're legitimate and then add it to a blockchain is a minor. That's somebody that's running a computer that has the only function of running computing power, competing with other computers that are trying to do the same thing and win the right to solve the block and add those transactions to a blockchain and in turn get rewarded with Bitcoin. This is how new Bitcoin get created. - Got it, okay. I never knew that that's what my mind was. - And it takes a whole lot of energy and the reason it's called proof of work takes a whole lot of energy to do this process and the reason why this proof of work run these computers and really put a lot of computing power in to see who can solve this puzzle kind of. They're all guessing this random number in whichever mining computer guesses that number quickest by solving all these complex math problems essentially they then earn the right to take those transactions, verify that they're legit by cross-reference them with the blockchain data and then add a block to the blockchain. So here's how it's really hard to scam or fraud because we have a history of all the transactions. So if you wanted to send me a 10th of a Bitcoin, greatly appreciate it. If you send me a 10th of a Bitcoin, it can be known on the blockchain that you receive that 10th of a Bitcoin legitimately because there's a previous block that shows this address sent to 10th of a Bitcoin or two 10th of a Bitcoin to add it to this address here. And now you're gonna send one to me so we know that it's legit because we see that you legitimately received it previously. And so this database, this ledger, gets updated at the same time across the entire globe so it doesn't create an opportunity for anyone to say, well actually, Alec, you're gonna send me 0.5 instead of 0.1. You see if somebody tried to do a fake transaction and let's say there's a miner and they're like, "Well, I'm a miner, I'm gonna go ahead and try to add this one in, I'm gonna add two Bitcoin in or whatever." All the other computers, all the other blockchain are the nodes that are hosting the blockchain, they would kick it out and say, that doesn't match our ledger. This is fraud. - Yes, got it. - So essentially this ledger's getting updated repeatedly all at the same time. - Random places as well. So you couldn't ever like, game the system and try to have multiple people commit fraud at the same time. - The only way to game the system is if a significant majority of the miners colluded together to start creating their own Bitcoin or changing the rules. But anyone could become a miner themselves. - Anyone can become a miner. - It would be extremely challenging to do. You would have to fire up a whole lot of computing power and you would actually have to manufacture a whole lot of chips and there's a lot of the chips that are being manufactured already spoken for. - Got it. - So it's extremely secure the Bitcoin network. So again, it's decentralized because there's not one party that controls the network. People that are running miners, these mining computers, people that are hosting the blockchain and then different developers and software, wallet developers, it's a giant decentralized, no corporation, no government, no CEO, decentralized and spread on all these computers. So that solves the centralization problem I was talking about earlier. And then in order to avoid double spending, it's distributed that ledger that keeps a record of who sent what Bitcoin to whom and when and how much it keeps a record of it distributed on all these different ledgers. And so if somebody tries to say, there's actually this much Bitcoin when really there wasn't, they would see that that's not what our ledger says. We're gonna toss that fake transaction out. We're not gonna include this fake block that has misinformation in our blockchain. And so far, people always wanna say that this doesn't work, it's gonna get hacked, it's gonna get scammed, then operating just fine since 2009, without really any issues. There's been a couple bugs here, but because it's open source, anyone can audit the code, anyone can see if there's any trickery or the NSA slips up the name or whatever, anytime there's any slight little bug or issue, people find it very quickly. - And what happens after it's found? 'Cause it is the code itself still centralized in terms of who created it. - So here's another question. I don't know if you wanna get into this now. We could talk about Epstein's role in development. - Please, dude, because I know for a lot of my audience for those, anytime I do a crypto episode or even reference crypto, there is inevitably someone. And I understand their skepticism, especially with how we've been lied to in a variety of ways and how movements and things that seem promising get co-opted in many ways, that someone will come out of the woodwork and say that Bitcoin and crypto and blockchain technology was created by DARPA or created by the CIA or the NSA or some government faction. And no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, therefore he's probably a CIA asset or something like this. And again, I understand the skepticism. And so with that, I would love to just discuss some of the questions surrounding all of that. - First though, did my explanation was that satisfying? - Dude, it was 100%. I never knew what, like I've had multiple people try to explain mining to me before your explanation. (claps) - Claude. - Okay, and for folks that are watching, like the best way to learn it too is to experience it and give it a shot. Okay, so all that to say, like Bitcoin is awesome. And it was this radical innovation that created the ability for free people to send and receive money anywhere in the world without any third party getting in the way of it or saying no, which is pretty profound. I used to go from, I didn't share this, but me and the mother of my kids, we did like four cross-country road trips using Bitcoin only. Starting like 2014, 2015 and we would go to the restaurants and the stores that were accepting Bitcoin. This was back when the purpose of Bitcoin was to be peer-to-peer electronic cash. That value proposition is since shifted by design, little siop action we can get into more of a store of value. - Right, into digital gold. - Into the stock market essentially. - Yeah, like a financial asset, which is unfortunate. But back in the day, we were like, this is peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world that's gonna compete with the US dollar. Now ironically, it's kind of getting incorporated into the US dollar legacy financial system. - Before we get to the skepticism, can we actually talk about that? Because the overwhelming majority of people that I know who talk about Bitcoin at this point don't use it in this sort of like the initial value proposition of peer-to-peer money transfer without any third party without using any fiat currency. And they're more using it for what you said that it's a store of value. It's like a secondary stock market. And then the other cryptocurrencies that come along with that. Like there's a lot of people in the freedom space are very split on XRP for example. Like some are like hedging all their bets towards XRP and some are like absolutely not, total siop. I still don't understand it at all. But just in general, what are your thoughts on the shift towards that and the siop surrounding it? And then we'll get into the skepticism surrounding the creation. Yeah, there was a siop that took place that's commonly known as the hijacking of Bitcoin. There's a book by Roger Verne and Steve Patterson called hijacking Bitcoin. So originally the purpose of Bitcoin was to be peer-to-peer electronic cash. In fact, that's what the white paper, that's the paper that's Toshinakamoto Hishi there then wrote and published in 2008. It was like Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Peer-to-peer, not a central party, peers participating, sending electronic cash. Cash is a very deliberate word to use. It's like small transactions cash. So that's originally what the purpose was. So I'll share that story 'cause I lived it and I'll work in Epstein's role, which is so fascinating. It's also like we're so choosy and particular as conspiracy and freedom people, 'cause we're like, Bitcoin's so cool but we're like, it ain't cool enough now. That now it's all lame, but it's still cool, but now it's lame. There's other peer-to-peer electronic cash that's private. You know that whole blockchain stuff I was breaking down, that's all completely transparent. It can be seen that this address sent this much Bitcoin to this address. And if you, when you sent me that 10th of a Bitcoin earlier, if that address was tied to your identity, it's actually a pretty sophisticated financial surveillance system if you can tie the address to your identity. There's ways around that, but one of the innovations that other cryptocurrencies like Monero or Zeno, I'm a big fan of and we teach. our students at the Priya Academy, it's completely private. You can't tell if who sent what to whom or how much was sent. Just a wallet sends another wallet to someone else and you have no idea who has the wallet essentially. Correct. You can't see what's going on, but you can see everything on the Bitcoin blockchain. Okay, so Bitcoin was originally intended to be peer-to-peer electron cash for the world. And starting in 2014, 2015, it really started to gain much more adoption. That's what it was all about. And our little tours across the country, we would go encourage merchants to accept Bitcoin. And the value proposition was you can send money anywhere in the world for little to no fee and you'll receive it almost instantly. It'll settle almost instantly. Takes 10 minutes to add a block to the blockchain. It's not long it settles, but Visa settles a day later, two days later, bank account nonsense. And so a lot of people were starting to use Bitcoin. There were big corporations like Dell.com, New Egg, Expedia. They were starting to add Bitcoin as one of the options when you would go to their checkout. And us early Bitcoiners were like, this is huge. We'd celebrate every time there would be a new addition. Well, there was a challenge. Bitcoin was growing so much that all the transactions that were taking place in the memory pool. There wasn't enough data space in each block to include it in the next block on the blockchain. So just being caught up in this memory pool for an attempt to create it. It was stuck. And so Bitcoin has this wonderful free market mechanism called transaction fee. So included with every transaction and most cryptocurrencies do this too, you add a transaction fee. Usually the wallet does it automatically. And so that transaction fee is a bidding system. So let's say that we're at dinner actually. This is what people used to do. You can still do it with the Lightning Network, but I can share some of my issues with that. And then I'll reveal what the Lightning Network is in the story. People used to go to dinner and instead of one person, how I'll pick up the tab, oh, you can vent, Momi. People would use Bitcoin for that. And so if it's like some small $10 transaction, you just do the automatic transaction fee. And maybe it gets included in the next block. Maybe it's a block or two later, 20 or 30 minutes. It gets confirmed, but it's 10 bucks. We're buddies. I'm not trying to scam you. If somebody's like buying a car and paying Bitcoin, 10 grand used car, whatever, 15 grand, you can increase that transaction fee so that your transaction has priority because those transaction fees go to the miners. That's another way that they're incentivized to run these computers and perform this service on the network. Well, the thing that was happening was there were so many people trying to use Bitcoin at the same time and each one of those blocks could only fit one megabyte of data. The transaction that shows this address and this much Bitcoin and this address at this time. And it was comprised of this past Bitcoin. That's the transaction that would try to fit on this one megabyte block every approximately 10 minutes. The transaction fees would be like two bucks, five bucks, $20, $50. This made the network unusable. It totally screwed my value proposition for going to coffee shops and be like, "Hey, you're paying 3% to master card. You could set up Bitcoin. There's a bunch of people in town that'll be excited about it." Little to no fee. You can't buy $5 coffee and pay two bucks even. But the transaction fees got as high as like 40, 50 bucks. And now Dell.com and all these companies were like, "This doesn't work for us. We thought this was going to be some cool thing we could use as peer-to-peer electron." So this created a problem. How do we scale the Bitcoin network? And me as an anarchist who used a point to Bitcoin as a demonstration of when people say anarchism doesn't work, I'm like, "It's actually working right now in this global decentralized anarchist network. It's completely decentralized. No authority runs it. It's cool." So I was watching and I was like, "This is fascinating. We have a problem to solve. There's a governance issue. How is this going to pan out in an anarchist institution?" Well, two camps quickly emerged. How do we solve this problem of scaling Bitcoin? One of the camps said, "Well, we could do like Satoshi Nakamoto recommended in some of his past forum posts and increase the size of each block so that we can maybe have twice as much data, twice as many transactions, or we can increase it from one megabyte to eight or 12." Those were called the big blockers. I was a big blocker. The other camp said, "How about instead of increasing the size of each block because that would lead to centralization?" The blockchain is already starting to get big. If we increase the size of each block to eight minute, eight megabytes, 12 megabytes, 16. Now, all of a sudden, in order to host the blockchain, it would take these massive data centers and only large institutions could do it. And we want it to be decentralized where anyone can host a node and distribute the blockchain across the world." The other camp said, "Well, technology is advancing at such a rate with Gresham's law that storing data and computing powers, getting cheaper and cheaper and more accessible and more accessible." That's what I believe myself, too. I think history has actually shown that. So this other camp will call them small blockers. They said, "How about instead of increasing the size of each block, we create these layer two solutions. One of them, that's most predominant, it's called Lightning Network. Instead of all the transactions taking place and settling on the blockchain, we could take some Bitcoin. We can put it into this layer, too, and it becomes Lightning Network Bitcoin." And then people can send and receive Bitcoin amongst themselves. It deduces from their little Lightning Network balance. And now they're sending amongst themselves here, small micro transactions, like tipping a podcast or getting room for listed. Taking fee accuracy and using Venmo rather than using a bank to do a transfer or something like that. Kind of. I would say it's more like having gold at a bank and then issuing paper notes that represents the goal. So you have your Bitcoin. And it's still there, but now it's converted into these paper type things, Lightning Network Bitcoin and Transact. And so every, and then when you want your Bitcoin back in the actual Bitcoin, it settles on the blockchain. So you could take a 10th or a 100th of a Bitcoin, put it into the Lightning Network. That creates a transaction. That takes a transaction. And now we can send these Lightning Network Bitcoin amongst ourselves for little to no fee. And it's private, which is good. And then only ever or so often does it settle back onto the blockchain. Now we have Bitcoin Bitcoin again. That's what the other folks said. When I saw that, I was like, man, I've been educating people about Bitcoin. It's already pretty complicated. Now we got to create this payment channel and host our own little Lightning Network node and all this stuff. Let me see if I can share an analogy for the difference between the two as a big block guy, what you were arguing for. You would have been a big block guy. I probably would have been a big block guy. What you were arguing for is akin to back in the day when people started coming up with paper notes to represent a certain amount of gold. What you were saying is like, okay, I acknowledge that it's hard to carry around these gold bars of these gold coins. But what I'm suggesting is that we all have these big buckets that we carry around to put our gold in instead of these small little bags to put our gold in. That way we can still transact just using gold. Whereas the small block people were like, no, that's a little bit too challenging. Instead, let's have this paper money to represent the gold. Yeah, I think I would adjust the first part of the big block bucket. I guess it fits like, yeah, that's actually could be a pretty good analogy. It's like, this person wants to send this much gold to this person and his wheelbarrow is too small. Yeah. So what the big blockers were saying was like, let's just build a slightly bigger wheelbarrow. Yeah. And they're like, no, that'd be too expensive and too much work. Yeah. But we'll still be able to transport it on our own. Because I feel good about me drive, walk in the wheelbarrow over. Yeah. Instead of trusting that we're going to take these units into this new system and basically create like a paper kind of Bitcoin representation, so to speak. This had some hope and potential, but here's where the siop comes in. You know, if this were allowed to be some organic conversation, it could have ended up differently. Ultimately, the big blockers lost out and the small blockers maintained control of Bitcoin. When this conversation was taking place, there was censorship, heavy censorship of anybody bringing up the big block conversation on our Bitcoin, which was the predominant Bitcoin communication space along with the Bitcoin forum. They just started censoring people that would advocate for big blocks. Who is they? Who is they that's doing this? The moderators. Really? Yeah. The moderators. And no one knows who those moderators are. No, people know who they were. I think maybe our Bitcoin guy might have been anonymous. This is all documented in the hijacking Bitcoin book. It was kind of like, I don't think there was even a consensus. And then it was like, guys, we need to start working together. So if you're trying to say this other thing, this is what we already decided, it was like in play. What are we going to do? Let's have a conversation about it. And so it come to find out some of the biggest proponents for the small blocks and this layer two solution were associated with or directly paid by or part of a corporation called block stream. This corporation started paying the developers, the actual developers of Bitcoin. So there is a kind of a point of weakness. It's not a perfect system by any means. There's a lot of different parties that go into making decisions on the Bitcoin blockchain. There's the miners that verify the transactions and they have to operate a certain version of Bitcoin in order to stay in congruency with the rest of the network. Same thing with the nodes. Those are just hosting the blockchain. Miners host the blockchain and also run these computers and solve the blocks. Got it. Verify the transactions adding blockchains. Then you have the developers. The developers main. - I'm gonna obtain the core code for Bitcoin. - Is that decentralized or no? - It's, well, it's decentralized in that anyone could take the open source code and create their own version of it. - Is that how some of these other cryptos were created? - Yeah, they were cloned from Bitcoin. - Okay. - Or forked from Bitcoin. And I'll share the Bitcoin cash conclusion of this. Well, I guess there's no conclusion, we're still living it. And now it turns out Epstein's involved, which is so crazy. Oh, my God, I'm teasing the Epstein. - Yeah, I know, we'll get there, we'll get there. He's in the other room. Get him. (laughing) Anyway. Okay, so the developer, you can clone the code, you can update the code, but it really doesn't matter unless a bunch of miners and nodes start using your software. - Got it. - So the developers have a lot of influence and power over Bitcoin. From like 2012 to 2014 or 2015 or so, it was actually the Bitcoin foundation that was paying the salary of the developers, small handful of folks that are updating the code. - And it's again, sorry to interrupt real quick, just some clear. - Well, let's interrupt me all, I want to make sure we're on. - Yeah, are these people at all related to or working directly with Satoshi Nakamoto in that case then or no? - One of the very first one, his name was Gavin Andrewson, and he was in communication with Satoshi Nakamoto. And Satoshi Nakamoto handed over the project essentially to him to maintain the code. But there was already miners that were, so it's already decentralized. - It's all open source, so anyone can watch as any manipulation. - You can audit the code to make sure there's no little hole that can create new Bitcoin or whatever. - Got it. - Interestingly enough, Satoshi Nakamoto was around on the Bitcoin forums and posting, like here's what we should do and this new version is out. And then when WikiLeaks got debanked and de-platformed from PayPal and credit card processing, WikiLeaks announced that they're gonna start accepting Bitcoin. And Satoshi Nakamoto said, "No, no, no, this is like kicking the hornets nest, it's gonna get too much exposure." It's a bad idea. Shortly thereafter, the CIA reached out to Gavin Andrews and invited him to come talk to them about Bitcoin. I think this was 2011 or 2012, it was early on. So it was on their radar because they saw how big of a deal it was. I don't think the CIA invented Bitcoin. I don't think Satoshi Nakamoto was CIA. I think it was one of this lineage of cipher punks. People say it's the NSA because there was this 1996 paper that the NSA put out about a decentralized cryptocurrency, but it doesn't share the same characteristics or the technology that Bitcoin had. So people just see it real on Instagram, then they believe it, but you'd look at it, you read the papers and stuff and it's not the case. Okay, so the developers do have a lot of influence. And we all know follow the money. Oftentimes, you don't wanna bite the hand that feeds you. So from 2012 to 2015-ish or 2014, the developers were paid by the Bitcoin Foundation, which was a nonprofit that was funded by industry players while it's exchanges. And this seemed like a pretty decent thing. They ran into some financial problems. Revealed in the Epstein emails. First of all, starting in 2011, Epstein was emailing and asking questions about Bitcoin. He even invited a mere talkie who is a rebel OG Bitcoin developer, total within our ethos, got to meet a Manero Topia, total badass. He actually fought in Rijova against, in this anarchist Syrian resistance during some Syrian skirmishes, like hardcore. Anyway, total badass this guy. He was gonna meet with his billionaire financier. I don't know if he knew all his sorted background at the time, but that didn't fall through, that didn't meet. But Epstein was asking about Bitcoin, learning about Bitcoin. Then this guy named Joey Eto, Joey Eto, who works for MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which conspiracy researchers will know that they are part of this beast system predator class. This Joey Eto guy is reaching out to Epstein, asking for funding to go into one of his funds to in turn pay the developers. And he even says, people are trying to take control in quotes. Hey, Jeffrey, they're trying to take, there's all these different parties trying to take control of the developers. We want you to up your investment from 50 grand to 500 grand. That wasn't one of the same email threats too. So Epstein ends up putting money into block streams, seed funding. Block stream is a company that starts paying the Bitcoin developers. Block streams product is these layer two solutions, instead of a layer one where we all deal with Bitcoin and the peer-to-peer blockchain, as Satoche Nakamoto intended, peer-to-peer electronic cash. This Joey Eto guy and block stream, which makes a profit from creating layer twos and getting fees on the layer twos, they start coming into the fray, these developers and others start putting out messaging that we should not increase the block size. We should use these layer two solutions. This Joey Eto guy also was part of MIT and the Digital Currency Initiative, which later funded the developers and the Digital Currency Initiative and Joey Eto were responsible and played a major role in four CBDC pilot projects, what I'm called Project Hamilton. In my research, every year I do a CBDC threat report and my research came to find that MIT, in this organization, they're a lead player in creating interoperability amongst all the various nation states CBDC projects, which would be the technology that turns it into a global currency. - Wow. - I got the documents right here. - Wow. - So there's definitely some Shikaneery, Epstein was involved before that Epstein started talking about Bitcoin being a digital gold. And all of a sudden, from rebel freedom money, libertarians were all about it, peer-to-peer electronic cash, maybe it'll compete with the dollar, a government list, a stateless money, that we could settle internationally and we could do little small transactions amongst ourselves. It shifted from a medium of exchange as the prevailing narrative to store value. Epstein had some comment and some press interview that said store value, all these developers are starting to push for that. And then you got crypto, Bitcoin, Twitter, Michael Sailor now, it's all about number go up, it turned into this kind of greed driven thing. When in all reality, the price going up was a side benefit, just like living as a sovereign, no taxes is a side benefit. You're really trying to remember who you are, line with divine law. Same thing, we're trying to create a peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world to upend the Federal Reserve, beast system, all these foreign wars of aggression, printing money and making everybody work so hard. That's another reason why people don't take action, like, exit and build stuff, 'cause they're struggling to make ends meet. It's easier to go hit the ballot box. We had this vision, this idealistic vision, then it turns into some financial instrument. So there was this period, they're called the block size wars where it was basically battling for the heart of Bitcoin and unfortunately, peer-to-peer electronic cash, the freedom position lost and the other group won out as far as what is the predominant function of Bitcoin. I like to say that they neutered Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash and they shifted it into this store value. Hold on for dear life. Back then it was like, let's use Bitcoin. Looking back to, like, man, a whole lot of Bitcoin came in to my world and a whole lot came out 'cause I was trying to show people, it's a currency. Use it, we're earning it, earning a living with it and we're spending it and we're trying to spread the word and spread the love. Most of you are already aware that our everyday devices are taking a real toll on human biology. Talking about our laptops, our tablets, our phones. Each one of these is hitting you with non-NATIVMFs, artificial light, excessive blue light, and constant screen flicker. And most of us are feeling the harmful effects whether we realize it or not, but there is a better option. Daylight computer is actually solving all these problems at the root and I had an awesome conversation with Tristan Scott from Daylight on episode 202, breaking all this down. Here's a brief clip from the episode. We have a reflective display technology, similar to a Kindle, which was really the inspiration behind the product overall. It's really intended to be a magic piece of paper and the reflective technology works just like everything else in nature. What are some differences between this and a Kindle? Kindle is the inspiration, but it was limited. It's great for reading, for turnpaging, but if you try and do anything else, it's too slow. We wanted to bring a display technology that feels like digital paper, but can do more. It can do an email. It can go on the internet, can go on social media. We created a Kindle on steroids, which now means it's a healthier iPad. All right, so if you'd like to check out Daylight for yourself, just head to Daylightcom. Or just head to the show notes and enter code, TWF50, and check out for $50 off your order. And if you're a member of the wayforward.com, just head to the member marketplace and you'll find an even greater member-exclusive discount waiting for you there. And as a byproduct of using it, I would imagine the value naturally increases. The more people come into using it, and this period of year was. Yes. And there's Austrian economic theory about the medium of exchange and store value, which one comes first. And usually before something can become a store value, it has to have utility in a marketplace. And so it very well could have been the case that if Bitcoin were allowed to, what I would say is organically. There was some side up action, but if it was allowed to organically flourish and evolve, then maybe it would have became a store value also, just the same, but without neutering its ability for people to clear those transactions and settle transactions in the most decentralized of ways. So learning that Epstein was involved, and we know that Epstein is this powerful, dark figure doing all sorts of new world order types stuff surrounded by all sorts of twisted influential figures, especially in the world of finance. It's pretty clear that there was some siopory. And I think a key piece of it is, you know, I underestimated the enemy, the central banks and the predator class. I thought like Bitcoin, this is inevitable. It's going to end the fed. Now they kind of gobbled it up. And I think what they saw was we've always had machinations and plans to create a central bank digital currency. And now, all of a sudden, there's this alternative, relatively uncontrollable, unsensurable. It's not controlled by a nation state. What do we undo about this? I know. Let's at least make it to where, like, if we can't beat them, let's join them. Let's kind of bring it under our influence and our control because we can't have a competitor for our CBDC beast system. And I think that was the meaning behind that little neutering of Bitcoin's ability. My good friend Aaron Day has a ton of great research. In fact, a lot of the research that I share and spread is borrowed from him. He called the Epstein thing before the emails leaked. Really? Yeah, because he was putting the pieces together without the full evidence and then boom, you know, it kind of just really justifies. He's a pro Bitcoin guy originally, like in its original utility, its original peer-to-peer use. Yeah, he was very much pro Bitcoin. I'm still a Bitcoin fan for folks that are looking for a place to put wealth, to protect it, and to grow it. Long-term, I still think Bitcoin has value in that space. But as far as a peer-to-peer medium of exchange, rebel money to avoid CBDCs and still be able to transfer money online, I'm a big fan of Monero and now Zeno. They're both privacy coins. Zeno uses similar technology to Monero, but you can create tokens with Monero, like a private stablecoin and the stablecoin. Can you share what a stablecoin actually is? Yes. And I wanted to reference your last interview about cryptocurrency. Yes. Yeah, I would love to talk about that a little bit as well. Okay, so a stablecoin, here's another part of the sia. It's wild how the. My whole. Like my genesis was conspiracy. And then I got into crypto and stuff and then it all merged because now there's a conspiracy to neuter the crypto. And I'm like, "Yeah, God." It all comes back to conspiracy, really. It does, man. People conspire. People who have wealth and are obsessed with power and control and dictating the lives of other people conspire together. That's like. It's really wild even how the term conspiracy theorist is like, "Yeah, conspiracies happen." Yeah, they do. They conspire against Jesus. Yeah. Perfect example. That's another conspiracy. The biggest. the deepest conspiracy is getting people to forget how powerful they truly are. That was the deepest, most prevalent. That's a thousand centuries old conspiracy. Yep. Okay, stablecoins. What is a stablecoin? Okay, so a stablecoin is a cryptocurrency where the value of that crypto is pegged to the value of something else. Most commonly we have stablecoins that are pegged to the value of the dollar. The two most popular ones are called tether and USDC. One tether is worth $1. Ten tethers is worth $10. Here's part of the CBDC sia up in the US and much respect to auto and a rye and appreciate what they're doing to rise doing this innovative other blockchain and auto's educating people about crypto. But they were super friendly on the Trump administration and a rye kept on touting this policy report. I was just listening to it yesterday and today. That's because I don't even remember. It's been a while since that episode. And he's like, was really excited about their language. The best. it's the funniest, written, most entertaining policy report. Anyway, at the time, Trump was like, they put out an executive order to ban CBDCs and that kind of pacified a bunch of people. Because when the talk of CBDC started springing up, it was a big deal. This must have been like a year or two years ago. I saw it and I saw like, this is what we're teaching people to be prepared for. So we did this CBDC opt out challenge and tens of thousands of people registered and it was like CBDC exit plan and like, because we got a solution for that. And it was just this huge uproar, even within MAGA. And then Trump's like, well, you don't have to worry. We're going to ban CBDCs in the US. And everyone's like, oh, did you hear? They're going to ban CBDCs. This is great. We can trust Trump. He's here to save us. We probably didn't even have much to do with it. This is handlers like Howard Lutnik, the head of the commerce secretary. He's actually with Cantor Fitzgerald and they hold on to the US treasuries that back tether's currency. So here's the big thing that happened. Many foreign countries, the European Union, for example, they are moving forward with central bank digital currencies through a central bank, central bank digital currency. So quick, the difference between a CBDC that we're worried about in a good cryptocurrency that's more freedom oriented. Central bank digital currencies are centralized. So there's an authority managing and controlling them. They're censorable. I can't just do a transaction to you if you don't want me to. They'll get you can shut it down. They're surveillable. All the transactions are known. And they're programmable. We can do weird stuff like you can't purchase firearm. You can't purchase ammo if you're like get this red flag law or in order to incentivize stimulation in the economy. We're going to slowly lower the value of the money that you have in your account to get you to spend it. That's stuff programmable. There's cryptocurrencies that have those same qualities. There's cryptocurrencies that are decentralized, private, unsensurable. Right? Okay, so many countries, most countries are moving forward with CBDCs through central banks. The United States on the other hand, and this is something that is really cunning with Trump. This is a great response to the folks that say, "Would you get all the time?" Because you're going hard in the paint with sold Trump thing. Well, it's better than the deep state and common look at it in power. In all reality, it's not because Trump is an effective businessman and he's damn good at getting stuff done. He goes and there's a problem. I was just listening to somebody. I think it was Latinx. Or some insider in Trump's cabinet was like, "When there's a problem and we're at a cabinet meeting, Trump immediately says pick up the money." Pick up the phone, call so and so. It doesn't go to some working group or it takes weeks before they actually get on a solution. He's like, "Let's go." He's effective. I've read Art of the Deal and studied Trump at length and I've studied Bezos and Steve Jobs and all these Walt Disney, even. All these people do amazing things. There's stuff we can learn from him. Of course. Can I also add to that real quick, too? In addition to that, he'll get stuff done and that's not in the collective's benefit. The additional piece, and I think this point is incredibly important, is that had some one like Kamala Harris one. The people in the freedom movement who are orienting towards looking at solutions outside of government would have continued down that path, even doubled down on that path. But the moment Trump got in, it was like this, which is fine psychologically to some degree, but what it caused is people are like, "Oh, I now trust government again." Maybe they're not saying that, but they do. Even for the people who are like, "I'm still skeptical of government, but Trump, I love he's doing all these great things," or he's saying all this great stuff. They're now buying into the illusion of authority again. And that is a problem. I think if Kamala Harris had one, you'd have seen all of the mega people, all the freedom oriented people like, "All right, we're done with that shit. That shit's over. We're going over here to try to exit and build," as you say. Yeah, it was a brilliant sia up. It was. And that may be one of the benefits of the left right. Same thing, I witnessed the same thing when there was a massive anti-war movement that was spurring and then Obama gets in office. And all of a sudden, it gets pacified and sia up into the DNC and the anti-war movement disappears. Same kind of vibe with all these rebel maga folks. It's already interrupted, by the way. Interrupt all you want. We can go down side quests all day. So I know I do all my own little side quests anyway. No, it's in the way. This has been amazing. Okay, so Trump is more effective at accelerating technocracy than the Democrats would have been, especially in the context of central bank digital currencies because if it was Kamala, if it was the Democrats, they'd do congressional hearings, you know, just all this slow, rigour parole. But instead, Trump and the people behind Trump in all reality had the idea to like, all right, all the governments want to advance central bank digital currencies or centralized, sensible, available, programmable digital currency projects so we can control people. And Trump was like the Trump administration. Well, we already have infrastructure built through cryptocurrency, through stablecoins, tether and USDC, for example. What if instead of creating a central bank digital currency, which obviously we can take the temperature of the American public and so many people are against it? They do polls. They monitor AI, algorithm, Twitter, everything. They know what's up. They're super sophisticated. What if instead of that, we do what I like to call the CBDC sneak attack and we simply put forward the exact same benefit for us controlling people's money and socially engineering them, but we use the existing stablecoin system. Now we don't even have to build anything new. We just have to capture what the private sector already did and that's what took place with the Genius Act, which legalized these stablecoins. And then now that's what's taking place with the Clarity Act, which is essentially like forcing KYC and adding all sorts of regulation and consuming, capturing a bunch of the cryptocurrency space under the control of the federal government, the executive branch in Congress. And again, I don't want to fault your friend and your boy, O'Ry and then. They were like, "Oh, they're going to have regulation that are worth, too." We're trying to create an alternative system. We don't need regulation because we don't trust government and the regulation. It ain't about safety. It's not about helping grandma to avoid getting had. That's what personal responsibility is. That's where the free market comes into play. We can't continue going back to government because they don't have our best interest at hand. We should just accept that as a default position. Government is not here to help. It's a total siop. What they were excited about, or I was excited about it especially, I'm not trying to call a riot, much respect. I've met them in collaborating and all sorts of stuff, but they were all excited about the regulation. The regulation turned out to be exactly what we thought it would be a siop meant to capture this existing technology. It was really cunning. Again, I'm always in awe of the predator class when they hit this home run because the Genius Act required these stable coins to be backed, one to one to US Treasuries, which created massive demand for purchasing US debt. It also enabled the Latin American market and foreign markets, which are using tether, for example, to make payments because their currencies are declining in value. This gives them the ability to use US dollars, which are declining in value very slowly and stably at least, but some of these other Latin American countries are all over the place. It allows the United States government to then capture that energy, which is now being shifted back into purchasing US Treasuries, propping up US debt, propping up US military and empire, which is one of Trump's cunning ways of continuing global dollar hegemony. You got to hand it to the guy like, wow, this is pretty impressive. Genius, that's what they call the bill. Yeah. It's another example of why we should default, not trust politicians and default, not request any regulation. We're trying to create some rebel alternative systems here, a parallel economy, the things that defy the government. And also it's like, yeah, maybe some things are going to be illegal someday, but man has a responsibility to disobey unjust law. We're literally paying taxes and being governed by satanic pedophiles, which we already knew that. Hopefully a ton of people know that, but unfortunately I worry it's going to be just like 9/11 where it was like, it's so obvious that was false flag. But the predator class is like, yeah, what are you going to do about it? Punk. Right. Yeah, we were doing all this weird shit at Epstein Island and it's like all the most powerful people in the world. What are you going to do? We're going to get angry. We're going to post about it. The best thing we could do to bring about justice is withdrawal consent to be governed by this predatory system. But then people are like, well, what do we do? We still need a means of organizing society. We still need to have common expectations about how we relate to one another. We need to be able to conduct trade amongst ourselves. That's why it's contingent upon free people that understand this to exit and build and to build the parallel system. Or else everyone's just going to be like, what do we do? But if we're like, here's a beacon of hope. Look what we're doing. We're trading outside the system. We're using alternative currencies. We're raising our kids. We're not using their vaccines. We're doing all this cool stuff over here. Come join us. Hey, man, Mike dropped. Rapidly. Mike dropped on that, man. Oh my goodness. That's the mission. But the stablecoin thing was genius and the CBDCs are accelerated here in the US more so than other countries. They're also competing with each other too. It's so wild. It's so crazy because the general public CBDCs isn't even in their lingo at this point because they're like, oh, it's been stopped by Trump. Even in the freedom of mail, like CBDCs aren't happening. And it's like, no, there's this sneaky backdoor thing that they've done. God, that's so wild. What? Aaron Day is a great point. Aaron Day made. We're all worked up about CBDCs. It's something that's coming. The CBDCs are coming. But in all reality, remember those four characteristics, centralized, sensible, surveillable and programmable. The existing financial system that most of us use predominantly, myself included, is centralized, sensible and surveillable. It's not yet programmable for the most part. I've been debanked on multiple occasions. Same I have to. Yeah, you had it. It was so sketchy at the height of the whole charade of COVID. So with my former organization that I ran health freedom for humanity, my name was not attached to the accounts on PayPal at all. Like my personal name for the organization's PayPal account was not attached. The same day that PayPal removed me from PayPal and Venmo, because Venmo's owned by PayPal, was the same day that health freedom premium and he was moved, which means that someone on the back end, despite there being no link in terms of the account information, identified that, oh, this person is associated with this organization. We're going to delete both of them at the end. He's the one leading it. Yep. And I reached out to them and asked why. And they said, you violated our community guidelines. And I asked, which community guidelines did you, did I violate? And they basically just gave me the run around there. Like we're going to have to refer you to this person. I asked them and they said, I actually don't know. Let me get back to you. They came back. I went back and said, well, can you tell me what community guideline I violated? And it went nowhere. And I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm just not using PayPal or Venmo anymore. And they said, what are you going to do? Yeah, what are you going to do? There's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing you can. This is a great point because when people are skeptical of cryptocurrency, I, again, understand why they are. But it's ironic that a lot of those people are continually using like debit cards and credit cards, predominant form of, like, means of transaction. It's a great point. And it's like you're already using a form of digital money yourself that is much more controlled at this point in time, at least. Oh, yeah. I like to talk to you about using things like Coinbase and things like that. Sure. And it's not ironic coming from the same people who are using primarily credit cards and debit cards in their everyday transactions and it's like, or even just using a bank like Chase Bank or Wells Fargo or something like this. It's like you're doing the exact same thing when you're using Fiat currency. Yep. And that's something I got something to share on that. But yeah, I got banned from PayPal. And I got banned from Stripe. First I got banned from credit card terminal physical, the brick and mortar underground book stories to run and run and Austin Brave New Books. That's when I first started selling Crater. So Health Product, totally legal. I got banned from the credit card terminal twice and then had an online store square stripe, my roommate Stripe account, cash app figured out this hack with cash app to get people to put the credit card in by sending them a link. I got banned from that and then I got banned from PayPal. And then later I opened, I was able to open another account with livery academy and they shortly banned me from that as well. And then I got debanked from Frostbank, which I like to say their name. I don't do banking with Frostbank. I thought I was doing a good job because they're a Texas bank. They're not like nationally chartered. At least they don't think they are. And so I had Frostbank. It's a Texas bank. At least it's not Chase Manhattan. And one day I get a call from the branch manager. This is Karen from the branch, you know, the downtown branch. And unfortunately because you're selling CBD, CBD is even more legit than Crater. Both are legit. They're both plant remedies. The CBD had just been legalized a few years before through Trump and the Farm Bill and in the state of Texas they echoed the same sentiment and it was legal to do hemp and CBD especially. And they're like, because you're doing CBD, it's too risky. We're not going to do banking with you. We're going to send you a check and we can't do business with you. And what I told her was like, well, this is why I've been a big proponent of Bitcoin for so long because there's no branch manager downtown to call and shut the account down. And she replied, well, if we knew you were in the Bitcoin, we would have shut your account down a lot sooner. No way. I love that was great. You know, I was like, damn, this sucks, but this is going to be a great story. But to your point, like myself included, I do a larger percentage with alternative currencies. Let's not forget the value of precious metals too. We should really, what's the most valuable beyond crypto and precious metals is having human relationships with other freedom people that are willing to use alternative currencies and that you know and that are part of this freedom space. Yep. Be cool if there's a directory that showed all of that. That'd be really cool. Thanks man. Yeah, no problem. But don't you dare charge money for it. How dare you run a good service and have staff that maintains it so we can all benefit from it? It is so funny. It is so funny. It is so funny to me. Those comments don't even really bother me anymore. It's hilarious to me because I have asked people who come to me and say, Alec, why are you charging $99 annually for your platform? I'm like, well, we have a team that runs things and they're like, okay, and when I finally explain how much goes into the back end of all the things that we're doing, I'm like, okay, I can see that, but I just can't afford it. I'm like, okay, do you have a Netflix account? Do you have a Twitter premium? Do you have an I list all these things? And of course, inevitably, in almost $10 a month. That's less than $10 a month. Dude, it's $8 a month. That's what it is to be a part of our private based organization that has all these amazing features, but I digress. It's just, it's fun. It's fun. It's like, ironically, like a communist mindset to think you're entitled to someone else's work for free. Just because it's a freedom thing. Yeah. We should honor the folks that have managed to build careers in the freedom space because they're full-time dedicated to providing solutions. And we know that you provide plenty of free value. And it's your podcast and everything that you do on that front. So precious metals, relationships, but I always look at like the next layer. So it's like, okay, you're critical of cryptocurrency. because you think it's a scam or it could be hacked or it's part of the beast system, but you're using US dollars and 98% of your transactions are centralized, digital, available, sensible, Venmo, PayPal, checking account debit card is all digital. So it clearly is like, what's up with that? There's a tension there. There's some cognitive dissonance. So then it's like, well, then what's really going on here? I think a good chunk of it. And I want to challenge folks that are listening to consider if maybe this is why you've been skeptical of cryptocurrency is because you feel a little insecure or uncomfortable about the prospect of learning something new, especially when it comes to technology, if it's an older person that didn't grow up on computers like we did, because they're a little bit nervous that they're not going to understand it. And when you don't understand something, it feels a little uncomfortable. That's why it always comes back to limiting beliefs and mindset stuff. And when I teach people crypto, it's like I can teach you A, B, and C, step one, two, three to set up a wallet back up the seed phrase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, to send them receive, copy the address. That's the easy part. The challenge is helping you to overcome that limiting belief that when you mess something up or when you come in to like, well, he said to hit this button and then download that. But now I don't know where the file is. I don't know where to search for the download. My business is most, I don't know what it is. Maybe think I'm a sweet grandson. But for the most part, it's older folks and older women especially. So I've done Bitcoin basics for boomers and beginners was a workshop I did. Most health care today operates on an outdated mechanistic model, treating the body like a battlefield rather than a self-healing system. 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Head to newbiologyclinic.com and use code TheWayForward and that spelled TheWayFORWAD for $50 off account activation, or just head to the show notes for more info. If you're a member of TheWayForward, email [email protected] for $150 off. Your body already knows how to heal, and new biology clinic helps you remember. - You're dressing the parts of the day, relative to me, people would be like, you look like a rebel. That's right. - You look great, man. - I'm the grandson. Friendly grandson, but I taught like 300. There was 300 people live. I taught them how to set up a wallet. And during that workshop, I'd already like made the mistakes of going too fast or delivering too much information when people just wanted the simple basics on how to do it. And during that workshop, it was like boomers, Bitcoin basics for boom, come on, boomers, all help you out. And the marketing was all like, I know you may have trouble with your computer already or your smartphone, don't worry, I'm gonna help you out. It was a challenge, but we got through it and by the end of that wallet session, which lasted a while, I got folks to set up the wallet. And I was like, set your wallet up, send me your address, and I'm gonna hook you up with a dollar of Bitcoin cash and all these people were like, I didn't think I could do it. And I just tell people ahead of time, you're probably gonna run into some challenges and some roadblocks. Be aware of that. And as that stuff comes up, just take a deep breath and recognize that this is something new you're learning and you're gonna persist through it. And so perhaps the most meaningful aspect of my work is not getting them to set up the wallet, it's getting them to build that inner confidence and cultivate that inner power because that spills over into every aspect of our lives. And I think the cryptocurrency piece is just one example of that. Same with growing food. Yeah, I hear you grow on food, I know we should be growing food, but last time I tried to grow some food, I planted the seed and it started growing and then nothing ever went to fruit. And I put all this time into it. Now I feel foolish, I feel silly, I'm gonna give up. No, it's like, no, it's not easy to grow food and that's okay, that's why we're here. That's why your friend is there with the gardening, just persist, go, we always just give up. You never fail until you quit, you know? And the crypto thing is totally with that. So yeah, it's not about the crypto more often 'cause there's so many great, it's gonna get hacked. It hadn't been hacked. Like, when's it gonna be hacked? How many years has it been operating since 2009? Was that 17 years? You know, like it's controlled by the CIA. Is it, well okay, even if it is, you can still use it now. I mean, people say the internet's controlled by the CIA and here they are, like they're using the internet. And they're using the dollar system. That's literally controlled by the CIA. We know that for a fact. Exactly, exactly. Anyway, I think if we're talking about crypto being controllable, it's less about some sort of possible backdoor. Again, I still hold out that there might be a possibility for that, but like you said, we haven't seen any manipulation happen to that level or-- We'd be able to see the backdoor. So wouldn't it be hidden? Yep, there could be some trickery that we don't know about. But, right, exactly. And I think it's more about, again, the layer two that we're talking about and correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. It's the layer two. It's the regulation. And then it would be sort of using it as some sort of a pump and dump scheme where it's manipulable in that way where you see, for example, the possibility of a lot of people in the freedom movement start adopting that as sort of an investment strategy. And then a bunch of the major corporations all pull out at the exact same time and just deflates it like crazy. So there went all of your investments that you had, right? Which brings me to a really important question. Where do you stand? I think I know the answer to this. I'd like for you to discuss it a little bit on using it as an investment tool. You did bring it up a little bit like, yeah, I think Bitcoin is a viable solution for that. But there's a lot of conversation in the sort of freedom space where people are like, no, I'm not going to put any investments towards something digital. I would rather own land or own fixed assets, gold, silver, something like this that can sort of fight against the inflation and deflation of currencies, especially when we're talking about gold. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I would just share my framework for what we ought to be investing in. And it varies depending on where you are financially. So for somebody that is broke and struggling to make ends meet, I don't think they have any business invests, but that's maybe a little pushy. But they ought not to invest in Bitcoin or really much of anything, except for themselves. Investing in yourself is the number one investment anybody could make because it never goes down in value. It can't be taken away from you. And if you are struggling financially, that's the number one thing you ought to be doing. Invest in yourself, your mindset, skilling up, then trying to produce health for sure, and then producing more income to get yourself out of a tough financial position. Then when you have expendable income, you should still invest it in your ability to earn more income. Then when you get in a decent financial position, then it's like, well, where do I put my money? There's a variety of different places that I think are good, and it shouldn't only be one. But I do think Bitcoin has usefulness in that. It's like digital, digital good, digital bad. It's an asset and a liability. It's a liability in that it's dependent on the internet. But it's an asset in that it uses the internet to be able to transact all over the place, really easily with ease. For example, moving a billion dollars worth of gold compared to moving a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin is a totally different ballgame. And the Bitcoin is much more graceful to do so. But like it or not, we are entering an increasingly digital world. That's a fact. And as somebody that's trying to take money and protect it from inflation or grow it, Bitcoin is positioned to potentially be the most valuable asset on the planet. I mean, it overtook silver for a little period. Now, silver blew up and gold blew up more so than Bitcoin. But it's possible in the future that Bitcoin's the number one most valuable asset, more valuable than gold, which is the most valuable. There's also a finite amount of it, right? There's a finite amount. And that's debatable. So hard-coded into the Bitcoin software, the protocol that the nodes, run, the miners run, the wallets have to comply with, there will only ever be 21 million units, which creates digital scarcity, which is pretty big innovation in and of itself. And so that's awesome. And that's why there's a huge interest in it, especially in the legacy financial sector. And it's like, if there's somebody that's a little more mainstream or they're a freedom person, but they're a little more conservative, it's not a bad idea to have exposure. 5% 10% of your investment portfolio in Bitcoin. But yeah, it's hard coded to be 21 million, but we can't say that as 110% fact because the code can change. It's shifted in the past. There has to be a consensus. It's an elaborate process in order for Bitcoin to update the code. But it's possible you would bet that all the Bitcoin players and participants would be shooting themselves in the foot, essentially, to start creating new Bitcoin all of a sudden. So it's possible, but highly unlikely possible. But the incentive mechanisms that are in place would create a very strong deterrent because if the code gets updated and there's a debate about it, should we update the code, there needs to be a conversation about it, at least the way that Bitcoin is now, then the price would tank because that's destroying one of its good properties that it's finite, unlike fiat currency, which is created a thin air. If you really want to know what I think is going to happen, I think what's likely to happen in the future with Bitcoin, this is going to take time. It's going to basically take the same path that gold on deposit in banks took in the original banking started with. It's inconvenient to carry gold. It's a security risk. So let's take our gold and put it in this bank and they're in issue paper units, but the banks can't be trusted. They started issuing more paper units than gold they had on deposit, which is exactly what the US government did as well. And so where things are shifting with Bitcoin becoming legitimized, which is an asset and a liability as well. It's a pro and a con is that banks are going to start custody in Bitcoin. The way has already been paved for this being cleared for this right now as we speak. Banks are going to custody Bitcoin and then kind of like the Lightning Network does, they're going to issue these paper Bitcoin. Or digital tokens. Digital tokens backed by Bitcoin. Exactly. They're going to have their own stable coin and part of it's going to be backed by Bitcoin. So if someone is seeking cryptocurrency as an investment, I always encourage people just to focus almost predominantly on Bitcoin and Bitcoin only. There's a lot of other pump and dumps. There's a lot of other. If you're going to, unless you're going to make it like, you're going to dedicate significant time and attention to like mastering this. You're going to get out competed by the guys that are. Yeah. And that's incredibly risky. I know, but multiple people who like day trade crypto and they've lost a shit ton thinking they knew and could analyze the market. I'm like, this is like, you got to be better than the pros. Yeah. This is way more volatile than the typical stock market. I don't find any, it's not appealing to me. I used to do that myself, but then I was like, what am I spending all my time doing? I want to provide value to society. That's how I want to earn a living by helping people and solving problems, not just messing around ones and zeros on a screen. Bitcoin, I think, above the others. I would encourage people to avoid cryptocurrency projects that have some kind of CEO or company, corporation, or entity behind them because the beauty of Bitcoin, some people say it's a liability that we don't know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, who could it be? Maybe there's something weird going on there. So yeah, I get it. That's a risk. Also an asset in that we don't have a person that could be leveraged, that can be leaned on by the government. So the beauty of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency projects that are truly decentralized, like Monero, is there's nobody to sue. So if the government wants to try to shut it down, what do they do? They send a cease and desist order. That just happened with this project called Texitcoin here in Texas. You may have seen their ads at airports. They spent a bunch of money advertising. I have, yeah, I have. And I would encourage everyone in our freedom community to avoid cryptocurrency projects that have an MLM component like the plague. I don't have a problem with MLMs. I was involved in DoTERRA, Young Jeviti, thinking about hopping on board with the patches. Dude, I like life with big stuff. Yeah, the MLMP still bothers me, but I get it. I get why? It works to spread something. Yes, it does. And then it creates opportunities for people to earn income as well. But if it's an MLM project tied to crypto 99 times out of 100, it ends up being a flop or an outright scam. One of them was called BitClub. And an or good friend, Mickey Willis, put out a documentary about the gentleman, Joby Weeks, who I know back in the day, but I'm not saying anything negative about Joby Weeks, but I will say I sniffed out BitClub as a scam early on too. And this Texitcoin thing had all the same indicators of BitClub. They reached out to me because I'm a Texas crypto guy early on there. Do you want to be involved with the project or help consult? It's a clone of Litecoin. So it's a fork from Litecoin, which is one of the very first altcoins. And they're starting to tell me about it. And it's going to be the cryptocurrency for Texas. It's going to be our own Texas cryptocurrency. And I was like, oh, great. Well, what's the mining like running those computers? It was all centralized. So originally they told me, well, anyone can mine. But you have to get approved by the organization that started it. What was the rationale behind that? Well, later I learned that it had an MLM component. And I think the entire thing was just, let's make money through the MLM. And so I was warning, and I saw it in our freedom community. Texitcoin, Texitcoin, they're having these lavish meetups and stuff. And I went to the Ron Paul 90th birthday party. And now mind you, the organizer of this project, he funded this lavish, Ron Paul does an annual birthday party. I'd never gone. Usually it was at his house and stuff. And then they started doing a ticketed event. So anybody could come. First it was like in by it only then it was ticketed. And then this 90th birthday is 90. Wow. It was a huge event conference. Young Americans for Liberty and this gentleman funded it. And he was like, I'm so grateful. Texitcoin, we're sponsoring and we're able to do this. And I knew that Texitcoin should be avoided at that time. But I was like, well, at least he's putting the money into honoring Ron Paul. But I'd saw out in the parking lot. He had this brand new Porsche decked out in Texitcoin. No fault to folks that buy a nice car or produce some value with the company and they buy a nice they drive nice things or whatever or dress fancy. Buy all means. I'm not faulting anyone for that. Just a vibe that you got. I saw that. I was like, oh man. There's a vibe here. So I tried to coach my friends about it and the challenge with these MLM projects is people don't that's how I'm always like. But I'm having conversations or when I'm selling or trying to convince someone of something and they're like throwing stuff back at me, I'm trying to like take it a layer deeper. Like, well, why are they saying that? What's up with this? And what's going on there? And when it's an MLM project, people are less likely to think critically about it because they want to make money educating people about it. But then they rope their friends into it. So I told people, stay away. It's centralized. The problem with the centralized cryptocurrency project is if the government doesn't like it, they can sue this company and sue this guy. Bobby was his name. And then the whole thing's going to tank and crash and burn and sure enough about a week ago, I saw all the news. Texas, the Texas version of the SEC sent a cease and desist order to this guy. Bobby in the whole texite coin saying, and you see the coin, you know, I noticed the coin too. This is just speculation. I'll make it clear if I'm speculating. I haven't been speculating yet. There's some speculation here and there. But I'll make it clear it's speculation. The coin was like a dollar and then it had this big jump that was almost vertical and then it was like $2 is for a while and then we have this big jump that was almost vertical and then it would stay and it was like this plateau effect. And if you've studied markets or you've seen charts, it's usually like this. It has a tendency to go in one direction, but it's kind of wild ride. It's not. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. My speculation, just speculation, hoping I'll get sued for this or whatever. Speculation, just a theory is that people insiders were purchasing the coin on an exchange driving the price up, which created excitement for people to go get into the project. The project largely paid out in this texit coin unit. There wasn't even a lot of volume if people wanted to sell their texit coin for dollars or for stable coins or whatever to get out of it. And then sure enough, it went up to like six bucks, seven bucks, and now it's worth like 20 cents. And a bunch of people bought these thousand dollar-ish mining contracts or whatever. And it was all hosted centralized. So I would tell people it's a centralized project and it has an MLM component. You should avoid it and sure enough, it all panned out. So it is, and then our buddy arrived, would be like, that's why we need regulation to protect us from that. Now that's why we need common sense. That would be the opposite. I would not want more regulation on that note, like, because that's what comes up for me is that when you have a project that has a centralized figure associated with it, especially when it's something that is creating an alternative, anything, like currency, especially to the system that's going on, you would want less regulation because as things continue to have more regulation, that individual is going to be subject to, hey, you either play by our rules or we're going to crush you. Sure. Yeah. And he's going to be captured. Yeah. Or the government's going to pick winners and losers through their enforcement of regulation. Yep. It's a total fugazi. Yeah. Now, markets prefer regulation, well-regulated militia meant to make more regular, like more consistent. Yeah, but a true free market does that on its own. It does. It does. A lot of people are like, we want these institutions to be big. My thing is like, we kind of got to accept the reality. If we truly want to create a genuinely free society that for a while it's going to be scrappy. And we got to start scrappy and build up. And like private, rebel kind of money stuff isn't going to turn into some big mass adoption thing. And it very well may not, the masses may not want to work with us on some of these decentralized agorist, like revolutionary market anarchism kind of exonable projects. So do you think something like Manero is a viable solution to that or like a project like Cortal? Like these are viable solutions towards this? Yes. So Bitcoin, digital gold, unfortunately, that's the value proposition decentralized, unsensurable, becoming more mainstream, which is a liability as a freedom person. It's an asset if you're putting money into it with the desire for that value to go up. Because the more mainstream it becomes, the more institutional money is going to go into it. Wow. So put our money in land, gold, silver, and yeah. Gold and silver and land and businesses. Yep. Offshore real estate as well. So then like what about our rebel money? Manero is the rebel money. Manero's private, it's decentralized. The community and the network is extremely edgy and thanks like we do. ZCASH is another private cryptocurrency. But ZCASH recently added some stuff to their code that would allow to force non-privacy so that it could stay on big exchanges. Manero developers were approached and asked to do the same thing and they said you can pound sand. Hell yeah. We're a rebel money. Okay. So Manero, then you have Zeno. Zeno is similar to Manero in technology, but it allows you to create tokens. So you have the Zeno blockchain and you could issue way forward coin and you could reward it to people or confluence token and you reward confluence coin and you reward it to get your ticket and we're going to give you 100 confluence coins and you can use them at the vendors as some special bonus or whatever. That's cool. Which is cool. And then they created, they actually created something supergroupy called Confidential Layer. These were developers collaborating through this project and my good friend Paul Puyy, he's the developer and the founder of Edge wallet. Somehow two stuff for folks, you to get started in the space, you got to set up a wallet. You can download one for free. There's no reason why everybody shouldn't have a wallet and at least begin to try to experiment with one. Do you recommend paper wallets or that's a total sidebar, but if you're storing long term crypto, a paper wallet or a cold storage hardware wallet like Treasor, that's a USB device is a little more secure. Paper wallet is just a piece of paper that has the public address and the private key. The public address is like the account number. The private key is what unlocks access to be able to send crypto out of a public address. While it's software does that all in the back end, I like cake wallet and I like Edge. Edge incorporated this technology called Confidential Layer. Now check this out. Here's how cool our freedom movement is and innovation. Bitcoin's transparent. It's kind of getting captured. It's transparent. You can see all the transactions. What if we gave you the ability to take your Bitcoin, bridge it into the Zeno ecosystem and now it becomes a Bitcoin stablecoin peg to the value of Bitcoin, but now it's private because it's on the Zeno blockchain. It's a Bitcoin token that is peg to the value of Bitcoin, but now we can send and receive that amongst ourselves without there being a blockchain trace. That's right. Yeah, it's so cool. It's like an arms race. It's like, yeah, Bitcoin's not transparent. They're actually locking up developers that try to create private Bitcoin is transparent. They're locking up developers that try to create tools that allow you to mix up your Bitcoin transactions to make them more private. It's called coin tumbling or coin mixing. Well, let's just create our own decentralized way to take Bitcoin and make it private. That's done through Zeno. It's called Confidential Layer and Edge Wallet makes it real easy to do that. Our good friend Mike winner and Jason Crowe, Quortal is another project. Now, Quortal is like, it's like a grassroots cryptocurrency project. Now, it's not necessarily the utility of that. The use case isn't currency necessarily. It's let's create a decentralized platform that allows us to communicate. That allows us to host videos. It's got YouTube, clever name, YouTube. It allows us to store information and ultimately let's create something where we can incentivize people to participate in creating our very own decentralized internet platform. It's in the works. There's a lot of work that needs to go into do that. But the vision is there. The core infrastructure is being developed. That's another thing for just to speak about people's disempowerment. If people are like, I don't want to get involved with crypto because they'll just shut the internet down. Then you're like, okay, so you're so concerned that the internet will be shut down that you're willing to miss out on an opportunity to continue to do business online, even as the CBDC system comes up or you're willing to miss out on potential gains investing in some of these projects. You're really concerned the internet's going to get shut down. What are you doing about it? Are you doing anything about that? Are you just, they're going to shut the internet down and they have all the power and we let them determine what the future looks like. Or you're going to be like, man, I'm really concerned that I'm so concerned that they're going to shut the internet down. Avoiding this really cool freedom technology called cryptocurrency. Maybe instead it could be like, what can I do to help create decentralized alternative internet platforms or communication? Like mesh-tastic is one. We just hosted a meetup in Bastrop to the Bastrop County Freedom Cell Network and then our friend, Marina, you know Marina. However. She's total badass. She host Marina. Shout out to Marina. She hosted one through her central Texas Agora group when they do a lot of collaboration when you do events and stuff. And so she hosted it in the Hill Country. That's the beauty of the Freedom Cell Network. It's like a regional thing and then you go smaller and local, smaller, local, but we're still connected as a region. We hosted one in Bastrop. There's going to be another one in East Austin. But mesh-tastic is, it's a small little device and it's just like a little block, little chip and it has an antenna. You have this device. You Bluetooth to your phone. Even if you don't have phone service, I have it on my phone, but the device isn't. If it was in my truck, I'd be able to communicate. And so it allows you to send text messages to anyone else that has this unit set up. Now you could take the unit and you could put it on a tower and that creates a node. And so if you had one here, I would be able to reach you from Bastrop because there's so many nodes between here and Bastrop that I would be able to send you messages. It's like a decentralized internet. It's a decentralized messaging service. So you can't store a lot. You can't send a lot of information or you would be able to build internet applications on top of it. But that's down the road. It's a decentralized internet, though, too. Right? Otto has talked to me about this. We're like, there's a way that even if the internet goes down or through a digital ID, you can't get access to the internet. You can set up and I threw different types of routers. A mesh network. Yeah, a mesh network. Similar vibe. I think you would at least, yeah, you could set that up for sure. There would have to be enough people participating. I don't know if you would tie servers to it or whatever. The point is there's multiple projects. There's not just one. There's Quartle. There's mesh networks. There's these guys. There's other cryptocurrency projects that are trying to push for that. And it gives me hope. But it sure would be a lot better. You'd be a lot more advanced if people would get their heads out of their rear end, quit rely on politicians to solve all of our common problems and participate in creating some of this stuff. Amen. Instead of just whining about it or being so impotent, it's an impotent thing. Who says the New World Order gets to determine what the future looks like? Right. There's more of us. We obviously, we operate in light, love, transparency, authenticity. They got to use weird siops and they're doing all satanic pedophile shit. It's like all dark evil stuff. Light wins out. It's the natural default order. If we choose it, and if we choose it, man, we have to actualize it through ourself. Which is a challenge. Yeah, exactly. I mean, but it's a worthwhile charge. It is worthwhile. Quick shout out to Poddigy, the team that we brought on to produce our podcasts. We started working with them last year and the difference was immediate. Way less stress on the back end for us with podcast production and our YouTube has grown significantly since bringing on Poddigy. If you're already running a podcast and looking to boost your production value or if you're thinking about starting a podcast, I highly recommend working with Poddigy. If you check the show notes, there's an assessment that Poddigy has put together to give you specific steps to take to grow your own podcast. And that's whether you're just getting started or looking to take your current podcast to the next level. Each month, they're giving away a strategy call with their founder Justin Moore and he is incredibly talented and incredibly smart and he really knows how to grow a podcast from the ground up. You're interested in working with Poddigy. Just head to the show notes and take the assessment. And if you decide to work with them, just mention Alexek in the way forward and they'll give you a nice little deal. With all that being said, though, the one thing that like, it is a justifiable concern thinking about either A, I think this is an unrealistic scenario myself just because of how much technocratic technological infrastructure they're putting up, a grid down situation. I think if anything, like if there was a grid down situation, it would be like a two to three day thing just so they can convert fully to whatever new system they're trying to implement. I just don't see a scenario realistically with how much they're investing in all the infrastructure. for the grid to fully go down. But on that same note, if that were to happen, you still have to be concerned about your bank account access if you don't have crypto or being able to use debit cards or credit cards. So it's a concern, even if you don't like crypto, if you're using Fiat currency, if you aren't exclusively using cash. Now that being said, more realistic scenario is limiting access to the internet based on like a digital ID of some sorts. I mean, even Texas attempted to do that for teenagers under the guise of protecting teenagers online and things like this recently. And I'm from my understanding that was struck down. Thank goodness. But that is like a real concern when it comes to the utility of even something like Manero. So what are your thoughts on that? - That passed by the way. - It did pass. - Yeah, I thought it was struck down. - And it requires miners to verify their ID and it's just the beginning in spreads, right? - Yep. - And it is a push for digital ID for sure. So the grid down piece real quick, if the grid were to go down, like you said, it's unlikely the grid goes down permanently. But if the grid internet or power goes down, you don't lose your crypto, 'cause it's stored the record that you have access to that crypto is stored in a decentralized distributed blockchain. It's only a matter of time before you get access. Again, when the internet comes back up, if the grid goes down for days upon end or the internet, you know, like your Bitcoin wall, it's probably at least your worries. There's gonna be some pretty serious chaos and civil unrest. And so I never wanna put it out, like some of these folks that think Bitcoin's gonna save the world or crypto's gonna save the world, that it's a panacea, it's gonna solve all our problems. Ultimately, when it comes to buying and selling goods and services, crypto is just one tool, Manero's my favorite for that. I'm also a big fan of precious metals, specifically junk silver, like old silver dimes, quarters, half dollars, 1964, and before, they're made with 90% silver. I recently was in Tennessee. I'm a trustee on this awesome project called Haven Village. It's a 216 acre private realm trust, PMA ministry, private realm, regenerative agriculture community, doing hemp homes. - Love that. - So cool, such a great project, really honored to be a part of it. But we were there and Amani, who co-founded it with her partner River, she goes to the Menonite Farmers Market and they're menonite, so they don't do credit cards. And I knew going up there, I was like, I'm gonna bring some junk silver. I do this monthly subscription with this company, Wise Wolf Gold and Silver, it's called the Wolf Pack. So I buy 125 bucks worth of silver every month, and it's tradable small amounts, which is great. So I was like, I'm gonna bring some silver up there, and we're doing this event to bring people that may want to live at the community. And I'm gonna see if I can use some of my silver up there. And she's like, well, we're going to the farmer's market. I was like, perfect. So I walk up and I'm like, hey, I noticed that you guys don't accept credit cards, knowing that they'll be all excited about that. They're like, yeah, we don't do credit cards. Nope, for certain. They probably, they know it's the beast system. They actually had some Christian literature talking about credit cards and internet and AI stuff. Like, it's the beast, the market, the beast and stuff. Wow. I was like, these guys got it down. So I was like, okay, we don't accept card. Would you be willing to accept silver in exchange for your veggies? And now the teller was kind of like, oh, but the teller behind him piped up silver, well, I'll take silver coins and it struck up a conversation before you know it, these other three younger men and night guys come out and they're all excited to learn about it and they're holding the coins and stuff. So I ended up buying 52 bucks worth the organic, men and night grown veggies with precious metals. And it takes striking up conversations. That's really what it takes to build the counter economy. So yes, crypto is great. It's the best tool for sending and receiving money beyond government control online. Most everybody listening does online purchases. If we want to continue to do online purchases with other freedom people, when the CBDC system is fully implemented, we ought to know how to use cryptocurrency. But we also ought to build relationships with local vendors, farmers, markets, food producers, businesses, healthcare practitioners, whatever, natural healthcare practitioners that accept precious metals as well. And really what it comes down to, if the grid goes down, the most valuable thing that we can have is trusting relationships with other people that are built on reciprocity, where we show up to get their backs. Nothing is more important. Everything else is just little side stuff. That's really what it all boils down to. But yeah, I do think digital ID will be required for internet. I think we're still a ways off from that in the US, thankfully. US is a little slower unless Trump has some little clever CBDC sneak attack thing. But that's when we should have mesh-tastic kind of stuff. A lot of people already have digital ID in the US through ID.me and all that stuff. I have a real ID in my driver's license. Chances are most people listening have real ID. - This is especially, man, it is so hard to get out of that. I did send a notice to the, what's it called here in Texas, the Department of Public Safety afterwards saying, "I do not consent to all these things "'cause I talked to the guy at the appointment." I was like, "Is there a way to not have real ID?" And he's like, "Look, man, "these cards come as blanks, "pre-stamp with that star on it at this point." So technically, legally speaking, you do not have to get a real ID. But in the state of Texas, if you wanna get a driver's license at all, and I know there's ways around that. This is a complete separate conversation. - Well, it's great to have those lawful sovereignty. I call it sovereignty through law tools in your tool belt. There's a lot of us are concerned with this stuff. And there are remedies in that space. - It just, when it comes to something like driving, this is a total side point. But just for me, I've had these conversations. It's like, "Okay, if I was a single guy, "or maybe I just had a wife, and that was it, "I would feel more comfortable with my wife." - That doesn't mind getting pulled over. - Exactly. But having kids in the back, not knowing how this would be cop is going to act if I don't have a driver's license and don't have plates. - Changes the game. - It changes the game, man. I don't wanna put my kids through that. You know, so all that to say, what were we talking about? Were we talking about? - Well, I gave up my right to travel. I turned in my right to travel experimentation hat 'cause I got pulled over five times in the course of two years. And I had kids throughout that process. - Yeah. - I got arrested filming cops too. That was the last, and then I shifted my cop tactics from cop block provocative. You guys are violating our rights to Jedi mind tricks. That's what I like to deal with. - Yeah, politely. - I keyed up. - I had a key go. - Yeah. - Yeah. - We were talking about digital ID rules. - Yeah, so with like internet access and digital ID, I forget exactly what I was talking about. But I guess the next point that I wanna discuss related to that is two things. One is using a centralized tool like coin base. I would just love to hear your thoughts on that and like what you recommend in order to truly use Bitcoin 'cause so many people have almost adopted this mindset if they think of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, they automatically think, "Oh yeah, I'll just get a coin base account." What are your thoughts on that? - Okay, so it's like how do I acquire crypto? Most people will purchase cryptocurrency through an above board exchange. That's what I call it. An above board exchange is a licensed exchange where you have to complete what's known as know your customer process, KYC, and short. That's part of the Department of Treasuries Bank Secrecy Act, which got dramatically expanded after the Patriot Act and is getting expanded now all the time. The Clarity Act, the Genius Act, brings all the stable coins into compliance with all that stuff. And so in order to purchase cryptocurrency on an above board exchange, you scan your driver's license, they cross-reference it with a known terrorist, criminal organization database, and then as long as you don't have a red flag, then you could purchase crypto, but then it's tied to your identity, which is less of a problem if you purchase a Monero because Monero's private. But with Bitcoin, if you purchase with Coinbase or an above board exchange, Crackin, Strike, you name it, Binance, and then you withdraw your Bitcoin to your non-custodial wallet, that transaction can be known. And then where does it go from there? That can be known as well. - 'Cause it's always on that portion of the chain. - It's on a transparent blockchain and the first bit is tied to your identity so it could be assumed that this, that, or the other. And in the EU and in other areas, they're starting to start, they're starting to ask questions like, did you sell it or did you transfer it to your own wallet? So we can keep tabs to make sure people are compliant with tax laws and such. Monero doesn't do that when you withdraw, you don't know where it went, but Monero's getting delisted by these above board exchanges. So I actually do this webinar called the Crypto Privacy Crackdown Report where I just break down all of these attack vectors on private crypto. So we got public licensed above board crypto transactions, which again, a lot of people that are in our community, they have an IRA, they have a bank account, they still are in the system. And so if you're gonna buy with Coinbase and you're gonna report it on taxes and all that stuff, then it's not the end of the world. You already have your account with Charles Schwab or whatever, this is preferable to that. And I will say if Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin, it goes up in value, that's not a taxable event. If you sell it, if you transact it, it's a taxable event. You can borrow against your Bitcoin and that's not taxable either when you take a loan against something. And so some people, this guy Mark Moss teaches this retirement strategy where you stack a bunch of Bitcoin with the expectation, it's gonna continue to go up in value so much so that you can borrow against it every year for what you need to live. - Yeah, that's pretty epic. - And then you don't really have to pay it back, you can even pass it on to your kids and they continue that journey. [BLANK_AUDIO] So if you're doing above board, then that's that. But it's like, well, then how do we do it privately? Well, the number one way to acquire cryptocurrency, what I teach, is to exchange goods or services for crypto, to offer up a massage service or a coaching or whatever product to actually use it and create the counter economy. Then it comes in, okay, why see? If you use Monero and it passes the Cannot Be Known Test, that's the test I teach people. If it can be known by the man and your attack spare, you should probably consider reporting and being a good citizen. If you're a taxpayer and it can't be known, then it's up to you to decide what happens there. Like if someone hands you cash at the farmer's market, can it be known? No. If someone pays you with PayPal, can it be known? Yes. If you purchase Bitcoin on Coinbase and Skinner Driver Slicense, can it be known? Yes. If you meet somebody at a crypto or a freedom meetup or a confluence and you're like, "Hey, you said that you're going to have some Monero to sell. I got 500 bucks and they sell you $500 a Monero. Can it be known?" No. So it's up to you. And even if it can be known just to add to that, there are solutions through using something like equity jurisprudence where you can be in a national, or there are different remedies, let's say. And it always comes back to the law thing. Yeah. You got to have that tool in your tool belt if you truly want to be free. Yes, 100%. 100% agree. I've already got on board with that too. I know. I was so skeptical for the longest time. I thought it was Patriot Mythology. No, I understand. It was confluence that panel with Curtis and BJW, the pickle guy. He's a hoot. Has he been on your show? Yeah. I think it was either just before just after Confluence. He wakes a lot of people. I'm not a fan of some of his approach, but he wakes a lot of people up to this day. Yeah, it's not my approach, but I mean, it works for him and it's his approach. I'm not the law and the brand new Cadillac. Dude, in the pickle suit and everything like that. That's cool. The pickle man. The best way to receive crypto without skin in your driver's license is to offer up goods or services in exchange for it. That's really what it's all about. The next best way is to purchase it privately from another freedom person, which is why it comes back to relationships being important. And then beyond that, you use what's called a peer-to-peer exchange. This is an exchange where you're purchasing directly from another person. And one of the exchanges that I recommend is called hodl.com, hodl.com. So you essentially find a seller who has a good reputation rating, 98, 99% or more. They've done hundreds of trades. So it's highly unlikely that they're a scammer and they'll have you mail cash to them. I know there's ways to disguise it. It's relatively safe. Or deposit money in their drive-through bank account or the shared branching credit union thing, co-op through credit union or Western union. All these are ways to acquire cryptocurrency without having to scan your driver's license privately. So if you're a freedom person and you're wanting to acquire it privately, there's methodologies. If you're just wanting to move some money into Bitcoin and you're complying with all the tax regulations and stuff like that, you could use Coinbase or one of these others. Coinbase is kind of in bed with the world economic form. I'm prefer cracking and others. But this is all the kind of stuff that we teach in our accelerator membership and we break it down all the processes because that's a great question that comes up often. All that will be in the show notes, including your cryptocurrency crackdown strategic report which you mentioned too. So all that's at the top of the show notes for anyone who's listening or watching. You had an open loop that you wanted to close regarding lightning networks as well. Could you revisit that? There's so much controversy and there's this concept people call themselves Bitcoin maximalists. Yeah, I'm familiar with that a lot. And they're like militant Bitcoin, Bitcoin only and it turns into this like weird toxic thing. In fact, some of them pride themselves and some of them pride themselves in being toxic Bitcoin maximalists. And then it's like all the cryptocurrencies are shit coins and blah, blah, blah. Now mind you, there are a lot of shit coins. In fact, a large majority of them are shit coins, but there's some that are worth noting. But anyway, I just wanted to bring up the counter argument because earlier I was talking about layer one Bitcoin, the blockchain. And that's what it was designed to be. And it should have scaled by just increasing the size of the blocks. And you could have done that and layer two. You could have done both. And there was almost a compromise called segregated witness, Segwit 2X. Segwit is the upgrade to the code that enabled this lightning network layer two solutions. There was a compromise that was about to be made in this anarchist way of governance where they're like, okay, fine, we're going to do the upgrade. So you can do your layer two and we're going to double the size of the block. That would have been the best thing to do. But that kind of got siapped and fugazi as well. And so people are like lightning networks great. You can do it in a private peer to peer decentralized way by creating your own channel. But I just wanted to point out to close that loop. And because maybe there'll be people that are maximists that are like, no, it's the best thing since sliced bread. It's extremely cumbersome and complicated to create your own payment channel. In order for the lightning network and Bitcoin to become a global peer to peer currency, you would have to increase the size of the block anyway. Because every time that you create a payment channel, you have to do a transaction on the blockchain. And then finally, unfortunately, a significant majority of the lightning network transactions are done through custodial apps, like a cash app, for example, not through a wallet that you have control over. So this allows more centralized control. It allows you to be censored too, which is the big concern. If we get blacklisted and we're using lightning network as freedom money, then they would shut us out of that as well. Yeah. Now shut out a cash app. I can't use cash app or PayPal. Yep. I'm in good company on the PayPal. It's a good sign. I feel better about myself knowing that John Bush was too platformed. It was a badge of honor. Yeah, man. I don't think I have anything else related to crypto that I wanted to cover. Do you have anything else to add? Anything else to like summarize? Actually, yeah. Let's hear your summarized elevator pitch. Like, here's my stance. And then please pitch your offerings. Okay. All right. I'll make sure to keep it elevator. Yeah. This is open to can of worms. I think that it is important for folks that if you have a desire to continue doing business online as this predator beast financial system gets fully erected around us. It's happening now. It's already practically here. Then it's important to learn cryptocurrency. If you're going to want to send money back home, if you're going to want to purchase goods and services from other freedom people online, or if you're looking for an opportunity perhaps to make some money because there's so much value and so much energy going into crypto, it's important to learn. But it's not the easiest thing to learn. It's a challenge. And it's something that's new and foreign to people. But I wouldn't I would encourage you not to let that prevent you from learning. So my company, Lippur Academy, we established in April of 2021 and we helped people to learn cryptocurrency, all sorts of exit and build stuff to exiting the city, building community in the country. But one of my specialties is teaching folks that struggle to understand technology cryptocurrency. So we mentioned a webinar. It's a free webinar. It's called the Crypto Privacy Crackdown Strategic Report where I share the importance of private crypto and then how they're attacking it. And then most importantly, we talk about how to overcome it through exit and build strategy. My 4C strategy, which is confidence and courage, overcome those limiting beliefs, believe in yourself, currency, alternative currency, not just crypto, precious metals to and barter, don't forget barter, commerce, trade outside the system, bind, sell goods and services from other freedom people and have an outside the system's source of income. People that are dependent on their retirement accounts or a corporate jobs income that could do a Vax mandate or social security. If you're completely dependent on social security, especially all that stuff could be, you could be locked out of it and it could be converted into CBDC digital control money. So it's important to have an outside the system's stream of income through a side hustle, for example. We teach that kind of stuff. And the final piece is community. Strengthen numbers, meet people, way forward, freedom cell network, whatever it may be, go to confluence, go to events, people's reset, show up and build relationships. That's the most important thing. So we teach the 4C strategy, exit and build inside outside strategy. You don't have to completely abandon your inside the system life, especially if you have a nest egg, a mortgage, a retirement account, but you do need to start working towards living more outside the system because the day may come sooner than later where you're faced with a difficult decision, we'll let you keep all this. If you're fully shot up to date, we'll let you keep all this. If you comply with the carbon output regime, let's keep all this. If you go into the 15 minute city or whatever. So people could be faced with losing everything, but that's when you're like, well, good thing I've been following. As advice, and building all these outside the system, parallel system, sources of income and food and sustenance and then you shift over. Anyway, we teach that in the webinar, break it all down. We do a membership program to help people with live events every single month, three live events and all sorts of stuff. So whether you work with us or other folks, it's important to learn this stuff. And most of all, to remember how powerful we truly are because we are creative people and we should not ever aggregate that responsibility to the predator class, to politicians. We definitely shouldn't concede that all this stuff is inevitable, maybe inevitable for the masses, but it doesn't have to be inevitable for us. You know what comes up for me when you share about the X and build strategy, I really appreciate that you said it's like a slow, it can be a slow, build over time where you're slowly orienting your life in that direction, 'cause I think a lot of people, when they see the prospects of this beast system just really overtaking so much of what's going on, they're like, well, they see on Instagram, or elsewhere, these people who have this lavish homesteading lifestyle, they're like, well, I can't do that, therefore, I'm just not gonna try. And maybe it's not a conscious belief, but it's like a subconscious thing where they see that, they see people who have, it all, quote unquote, figured out in appearance on Instagram, so they're just like, oh, I'm not even gonna try, so they just freeze and don't do anything. And it's like, no, you can slowly take steps in multiple avenues of your life to exit and build. - I just got kicked down like 12 notches. I don't know why I'm looking at the watch thing. I was, do that as a little. I got kicked down. I had a 10-acre homestead. We had an intentional community of 12 people. That was my family of four. Now my family of three and eight other people, all freedom people. And we had all sorts of food production, chickens, ducks, food forest, and a lot of stuff fell apart for me last year. I learned from it. I learned a lot of lessons I shared. I mean, my people's reset talk. - I'm gonna throw your talk in the show notes because I want you to finish sharing this piece, but like I want people to really look at the extended version of what John is getting into now because I was crying at the end of his talk. I'm not lying. I literally was crying at the end of his talk, came up and gave him a big hug because it was such an important message for people to hear. So please continue. - Well, thank you. I shared how adversity and suffering and struggle and a bunch of mistakes and being selfish and not focusing on the needs of my most important relationships led to a lot of pain, but also led me to Christ and to accept Christ and to build a really great relationship with God and to become a better version of myself. But everything fell apart. And now my house is bigger, which is great for me and the kids. We have more space. We had a small house, but 10 acres. Now I have a little bit bigger of a house, but a very small lot and no food production going on. And so I got 20 containers. I brought all the containers and the pots from the ranch. I got them in the backyard. So my point was like, I'm got kicked down a few notches and I'm having to start from scratch when it comes to growing food and building community. Like we did so much at the ranch and then things fell apart. Some relationships ended. And so now I'm trying to rebuild and do more organizing locally. And we got this every other Thursday. We do a community dinner at Casa Chapala Community Gardens. And the first one I did like a month ago, two people showed up. And I was like, I'm John Bush and you know, people know me and we've done so much and people are gonna show up. It's gonna be great. And first it was at six o'clock, nobody showed up. And I was like, oh man, this is gonna be really humbling. But instead of being like, why am I even trying and people don't care and the whole thing's just a loss and my ego's now bruised because nobody showed up. I was just sitting there drinking a Mexican martini and just like, okay, I think I need to get into the general public and bash drop more. There's some Facebook groups. Maybe I need to start advertising the event sooner. Maybe we should go bowling or do something fun, you know? 'Cause it's like a lot of people will try to organize or try to do things and then it kind of falls apart or it crashes or it's not successful. And then they give up. Instead you're like, well, what can I do differently next time? Because I know 110%, it's critical that I have relationships with other freedom people. I know it's critical that I know how to grow food and at least start. I know it's critical that I find some places I can buy goods and services with alternative currencies. We gotta start somewhere. And yeah, somebody told me, well, now you're gonna be a lot more relatable, John. 'Cause you're not on a big lavish homestead. You're living in the city in a small plot of lands. - But you can document all that and show how you can do it. - It's exactly what I'm gonna do. - That's the effect, dude. I interviewed Kimber actually, my personal assistant and she is leasing a property in Saskatchewan and Canada because she doesn't have the funds to purchase land right now. She just leased it from someone that she knows. And she grew enough food in a very small area to supply her and her family for like a whole year and then some. - Rock 'n roll. - It's like, see, we can do this. Like anyone can take these steps. You just have to be willing to put in the work. That's it. - Be willing to screw up too. - Be willing to screw up exactly. - And don't focus so much on how it can't work or why it's not gonna work. And it's just as easy. In fact, it's probably easier to align with how it can work and overcome in the obstacles as it is to beat ourselves up and to get all depressed about it. It's the same thoughts. If we can control our thoughts, then we might as well be our best cheerleader and champion instead of being all insecure and weird with ourselves. - Amen. Amen, man. - Easier said than done. - Yeah, easier said than done. That's for sure, but orienting in that direction, as having that as your North Star, so to speak. John, you're the man. Thank you for joining me. And for those who are listening and watching, please check out all of his offerings and the show notes. And definitely check out his talk from the People's Reset. Again, like I cannot recommend that enough. I love that talk. It was my favorite talk of the weekend, personally. - Thanks. - Also shout out to Grant Presence because it was an interesting experience at the People's Reset. He had never spoken publicly before. I had never DJed publicly before. So he and I were talking with each other. You know, he's a musician. I'm someone who does speak publicly. And it was really cool for us to both have that first experience happen and sort of have each other's back. And thank you for dancing to my set yourself. - It was cool to dance to your set. You rocked out. - Looking forward to dancing to your set at Confluence. - Thanks, bro. And you have a workshop at Confluence too. So if you want to come check out John at Confluence and all the other people cannot recommend it enough. And then I know John will have X and build on Sarventy Ranch later this year as well. So we haven't announced that yet. But I think it'll be announced by the time this airs. Keep it in. - Yeah. - Keep it in. I always like to do a big tease. Like you're not gonna believe where it's gonna be. We'll announce it in two weeks. - Oh shit. - But no, we should announce it before this when this is released or-- - Okay. - Keep it in. - We can also cut. - No, keep it in. Keep it in. Even if it's a tease just for the way forward audience. - Okay. - Thank you for being here. - Thank you. (upbeat music)