Ryan Cooper is the founder of Bitcoin Ranch and a part of the Milkmen Farms Alliance, who is focused on the economic sustainability of small, independent food producers. He joined Vance Crowe to talk about the collapse of our economy and the challenges of trying to get ahead.
Cooper discussed his transition to using Bitcoin for his farm's financial operations, highlighting its stability compared to the declining value of the U.S. dollar. He emphasized the challenges faced by American farmers, including the impact of ethanol mandates and subsidized crop insurance, which distort market conditions. Cooper also criticized the centralized control of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve, arguing for a shift towards local control and decentralized systems. He advocated for Bitcoin as a potential solution to these issues, citing its scarcity and potential to stabilize economic value over time.
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Ryan Cooper 0:00
It's so much fun. I was watching my two year old son this morning. He He like, climbed up on our coffee table, which already seemed a little risky to me, and then looked at me and with like, a bunch of excitement, and then without breaking eye contact, he jumped off the coffee table.
Vance Crowe 0:18
I know this exactly like where my daughter, my second is, like, she just totally believes that you're gonna catch her, even if you are not aware that she is gonna jump. It's just 100% faith in you.
Ryan Cooper 0:30
Yeah, it's, it's the best thing. There's nothing better than raising kids. I think. You know,
Vance Crowe 0:35
I had an experience just this weekend. I took my daughters to this the World Bird Sanctuary. I don't know if you've ever been there. Oh, man, it's great for kids, because you can get, like, within, you know, four or five feet of a giant bald eagle or a, you know, just different raptors and emus and stuff. Anyway, we get done, and there's a playground. So the little my kids want to go, it's four year old and two year old, and my two year old gets kind of run over by these older boys, and my four year old climbs up a ladder and like, demands that the the bigger boy, a boy that's a lot bigger than her, apologizes to the younger sister. And I'm like, that's in there. Like, I didn't teach her that. I didn't, I didn't, you know, tell her, Hey, you should do these things. It was just in her Yeah. And then this morning, before I left for work, I was like, Hey, let me talk to you for a second, like, if you're ever defending your sister, whatever you think is the right thing. No, I'll back you up. There's 100% that's awesome. And she was like, I know that's my job. I'm the oldest. And I'm like, That's just in there. There's something I didn't teach that that was ingrained.
Ryan Cooper 1:34
Yeah. So my, my eight year old son is real protective of of his four year old sister, but my four year old daughter is insanely protective of her older brother and her little brother. It's, it's funny to watch. She gets on me, you know, if I if I'm teasing them too much.
Vance Crowe 1:53
I mean, kids are also that mirror back to yourself, right? You hear them do something that you you don't like, and then you're like, Well, you got that somewhere. You heard me say that? You heard your mother say that? Yeah, so good. Yeah.
Ryan Cooper 2:05
I've had a sister in law visiting us from Finland the past month, and it's funny, the things that like, they'll just be a different personality come out of my four year old daughter. You know, she's like, she's downloading different coding. Yeah,
Vance Crowe 2:20
I've always thought, going back to your home school thing, that the scariest thing in the world is when a culture turns the children on the parents. You read about the kids in China that were told like, oh, you should report on your parents if they're doing this thing. And it's like, you take this innocence of children and they look up to their teacher, and they like them. And the teacher says, you know, if you hear your family talking about these things, you should come and tell us, it's for the best. And like you, you pervert that. I think that is one of the darkest evils in the world, and it's like the thing that makes me the most weary of the public school system.
Ryan Cooper 3:00
Yeah, yeah, you should be weary, I imagine, with the public school system, I'm a, you know, I was a born and bred and raised radical against the state, so I won't have a whole lot of friendly things to say. But schools are a funny thing, you know, because they're, they're a golden cow in so many ways you can't touch them. Golden Calf, I think, is the thing. You can't touch them. There's so much energy from the state to create these very close bonds between people and their local schools, you know. And everybody feels like, you don't attack my school, you know, go, whatever my school mascot is, and you don't realize that, like, hey, this, this thing, this has a huge layer of bureaucracy on top of it. It's probably responsible for soaking up 75% of your tax money. And it, it is an arm. It is an arm of of the government. At some point it's a government school. You know, I know, I know it's really important to a lot of people, but, yeah, you should be, you should be very careful about what kids are getting taught in there. I think that that's my opinion.
Vance Crowe 4:17
I hadn't actually thought about the the mascot thing. It's funny. I have never been a person that's been like, rah, rah, the school team. I'm, like, very anti mob. I'm, like, extremely wary of getting into groups. But I'd never really thought about that aspect of it. But I think that's probably true, right? Like, Go Hornets. I'm a hornet through and through and like, yeah, it's all a part of making them malleable and a part of the group. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 4:45
it's the Black Knights in in our time Farmington, the go black knights. And it's like Black Knights have nothing to do with Southeast Missouri. Farmington, we're a mining. Slash farming town. The rebrand was at some point, somebody just picked up name, you know, and so the superintendent for Farmington, he smoked a 12 year old kid on his bike with his Jeep a couple years ago, like, two years ago, and it was incredible watching the community, like, rise up in defense of the superintendent. So he it was captured on like a ring camera. So he, like, hit this 12 year old boy on his bike out in front of the 12 year old boy's home. And the mom, the mom went to our local police chief Rick Baker and and actually, I don't think she went directly to the chief, she went to the police. She tried to file a report. The police told her that if they filed the report, she and her kid would be liable for the damage to the superintendent's car. And come to find out, the superintendent's kids are being babysat by the chiefs of police wife, you know. And, and you start to look at that whole thing and and and realize what all of that that, like education funding is really defending, you know, like superintendents have a huge amount of resources power and influence in our communities. You don't even think about it, you know, because, hey, go black knights,
Vance Crowe 6:20
yeah. And the idea of local control has just been ripped out, right? Like, when I see the, you know, all the doge stuff that's coming on, like, we're gonna, you know, get in there and take out parts of the government. Man, if they could just get rid of the Department of Education, I would be 100% behind that. Yeah. And I know there are good teachers out there, and there are people that are, like, really dedicated to the system, but like, nothing good has come from federal like imputing whatever is going on in their minds into the into the education system. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 6:56
if you're in a small rural town, you should go look at your school and then go look at the administrator building, you know? And it's like driving through a small rural town and looking at all of the dilapidated, falling apart buildings and sale barns and compared to, like, the beautiful, newly renovated banks and government buildings, you know? It's a It's weird, man. It's like, it's not right, it's not how it's supposed to be. You know, the bureaucrats really are in like, total control, wherever you look now, you know, I was working for GM, you start to feel that, even from G, you know, you work for like, a big corporation, I think you've worked for a corporation the past, and you start to realize, like, there's a lot of good people in this stack, this hierarchy stack, but at the end of the day, most people are just forwarding emails like, you're just, you're kind of getting the email from GM and, you know, distributing the talking points for this month. And, you know, people from a community need an expert in some, you know, in some specific way, whether it's to buy their car, to educate their kids or to medicate their cattle, they need that local expert. And a lot of the experts are just kind of doing their jobs, forwarding emails. You know,
Vance Crowe 8:17
the craziest thing about a corporation is, you know, we think of ourselves as being in this giant capitalist system, but inside of a corporation is really just communism. And so we have these like entities that move around and, you know, pretend to be large arms of capitalism, but many of them, the reason that they became the big one that they are is they figured out how to do to navigate the regulatory system, and then inside of their own company, there is not some free market of like, hey, whoever can deliver printing to me is the one we're going to use? It's like, Nope, this is the printing group. And everybody uses this printing company, you know, this printing organization. Same thing with the IT of our computers. Same thing with how are we doing sustainability? And I mean, they figured out something. You know, my business is completely hand crafted, right? Everything has to be done by either me or one of my four people working in the way that they're supposed to. So clearly, they've figured out a way to make that system work. But the craziest thing is that it's so communistic that it becomes this, like bizarro world, when you really look at it, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 9:30
there's a lot there. Dude, I getting people to work together is really difficult. It's really difficult. So for the past three, four years, I've been trying to organize and collaborate with as many local producers of real human food as possible and help them distribute and scale and it is really difficult to get people to like each other and. You know, it's a it's everybody has their own everybody has their own incentives. Everybody's following their own incentives. And so when you when you walk into, again, I'll keep reverting back to this example, because it's in my recent past. But when you walk into a car dealership, you know, you've got, you got all these people coming to work at the same time to open up this business. They have some type of fixed supply chain that's bringing them inventory there, and then turn selling it to the community. The community can't afford it because we're all too broke, and so they go and they gather a whole bunch of banks. You know, you might have 3040, banks under the roof of a car dealership, and they're, they're quoting rates on behalf of these banks structuring these loans and and getting these vehicles sold to these people, you know, but most likely, there's a whole bunch of personalities under that roof that don't like each other, that are pissed off about something that happened last week. And you do start to think like, Man, why do people come here every day? Why do people just continue? You know, some of them hate their jobs. You know, I talked to the salesman, or this, this office staff and, like, just hate their job. They just, you know, this is just the thing before they get to the next thing. But they'll be there for 510, years. You know, some of these people, they'll spend their whole life working in line with other people that they don't really enjoy for some goal, that they don't really understand, for money, that they're really giving half of to that shitty Bureau Croc bureaucracy we're just talking about. So it's like, why are they doing that, you know? And I think it's, well, you were talking about your daughter having some things built in her. You know, we want to work with people. We do want to work with people. And people want to have a purpose and drive that purpose. And good companies figure out how to get people to do that. What probably the biggest company in the history of of humankind, the United States government has figured out how to do that really well, and they've done it, I believe, with the money they've got, they've got this, this money system that is very manipulated, very controlled, very intentional. You know, it's not people don't think about money much. It just kind of, just kind of, there I need it. I need to buy groceries. I guess I can borrow it from the bank. If I'm buying a car or house, they don't really think about it. It's like a fish swimming in water. But when you start to meditate on that, that money as the mechanism to drive people's intentions every day, you start, you start to see why large organizations that are able to assemble like a large, centralized bucket of that currency. They can, they can dictate people's daily actions, even if it's in con, even if it's contrary to what they want to do that day. You know what I mean. And so on the flip side, I know this long winded but on the flip side, you've got guys who are kind of waking up and they're saying, Hey, I know a lot of guys like this waking up and saying, hey, I want to do something different with my life. I don't want to be part of this hierarchy stack and this bureaucracy, which clearly doesn't care about me. Just wants to make sure, you know, I got my booster shot this week, I'm gonna go do my own thing. But the only thing working against them is the money, you know. So you take a young guy who wants to go start a little farm, a little homestead, feed his family, wants to have a garden, he wants to, like, work a small enterprise, to, you know, to pay his taxes and to maybe save a little bit for the future, and it's nearly impossible now with our our money system. So you are right. You know, we pretend we're in this big capitalistic society. We're not in a capitalistic society. It's primarily some type of socialistic society. I think,
Vance Crowe 13:57
Okay, we're gonna get back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper from Bitcoin Ranch, in just a moment, he's going to talk about what he thinks of as civilizational collapse that we are in right now, and it is a fascinating conversation, but I want to take a few moments to talk about legacy interviews. Legacy interviews is where we sit down with your loved ones to talk about their life stories so that future generations can not only know the stories of their past, but can actually see and hear their loved ones the way that they really are. It is a challenge to get people to sit down and record their stories, particularly during the holidays. You think you're going to do it, maybe you're going to pull out your phone, but it just doesn't work out, and that's for a lot of reasons, a lot of which is that there's so many distractions. There's so many other things going on. So if you've thought about trying to capture the life stories of your loved ones, let us help you out. We will sit down either in our studio here in St Louis, Missouri, or we can do an. Online interview, and I will actually personally host the conversation. My role is not just to get them to tell stories, it's to get them to forget that there are lights and cameras in here and to relax so that we can capture them as they really are. We capture their genuine laughter, their thoughts about deep and meaningful moments in their lives and advice that may be hard for them to access unless they've had somebody really listening to them for quite a while. If you've been thinking about doing this, then I would encourage you go to legacyinterviews.com and sign up to have me give you a call and chat about the interview that we can do with your loved ones. We can do it either as an individual or as a couple, or we can give each of your parents a chance to tell their own life stories and then come together in an interview with them together. This is a really beautiful and profound gift, and if you've been thinking about doing it. The holidays are a great time to make that happen. So go to legacyinterviews.com and fill out the form for us to have a chat. All right, let's get back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper. I think we're gonna look back on it and call it a bureaucratic society. I think that that's something that's never been talked about in school. You don't learn about it as like, oh, there's communism and socialism, and those are kind of hard to distinguish between. And then you have, you know, capitalism and democracy, and these are all just kind of overlapping. But the thing that we're in right now is bureaucracy, where it is like, there is a system that is created, and that system serves itself, and whatever it produces is exactly what it was meant to produce. And we bizarrely live in this world where we look at what it produces and we think, no, no, that's not what it was supposed to do. It's just that something got messed up. And the reason that, you know our taxes are out of control, or our school system is set up in this way is because it accidentally got messed up. But the reality is, no, it is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do. And
Ryan Cooper 17:06
well, and well, it's like the largest organization in the history of Earth right now. You know?
Vance Crowe 17:12
Yeah, that's right, yeah. Do you feel like it will continue? Well,
Ryan Cooper 17:16
I think, I think, I think organizations grow to a certain point and and then they they confront like a wall of nature, which, which, you know, a tree can only grow so big. The only way it can grow anymore is to spread some of its genetic energy and grow besides its point, you know, but besides itself, so not in the centralized way. I don't think it can. I think, I don't think it is. I mean, I think, I think we're, we're watching the collapse right now. I think, I think we're kind of in it
Vance Crowe 17:51
collapse, you'd use that word, collapse is a scary word, right? That collapse is where you're like, whatever comes up after the dust is settled. You know, we don't really know, but it may not be good, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 18:05
no, it's certainly true. But the collect, you know, we might, we might be in 100 year collapse. You know, we might be in 100 year and that's what I think we probably are. I think we're at the end of the collapse, whatever the nation state, bureaucratic state has been, you know, we were under an, it seemed, infinite amount of control and power from the church, you know, the Catholic Church, for a period of time, and that that gave way to, you know, a nation state type system. And I think we're going through some type of fourth turning event right now. Yeah,
Vance Crowe 18:44
yeah. I look at the way that governments think the world is going to work like I see the this morning. I just briefly saw it that we were sending F 35 over to the Ukraine, and now we're going to send these, you know, what are supposed to be the amazing warfare fighters. But then I at the same time, I see these fleets of drones, and I think, like that is the future. Have you seen this, where they're like in giant rows, and they, you know, like that, to me, is one certainly going to be able to outpace whatever the F 35 can do. And two is absolutely and utterly terrifying, because you don't need a giant manufacturing company like a Boeing or a Lockheed to make that. You get enough guys in a small area that can produce little motors and software, and you can now create a new kind of army that can that, that we don't have a way to stop it.
Ryan Cooper 19:39
Yeah, I think as decentralized as power projection can become, I think it will. And what I mean by that is building a big army was really effective at a certain time. Now it's just a huge target, you know, now what you want is like three really smart. In a basement with laptops, you know, and some of those drones that you're talking about. And so as all of these technologies get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, because and closer to closer to us, really, you know, as the internet has, you know, the Internet was giant computers at a couple universities, they kept getting cheaper and cheaper. You know, compute power got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and now we all have a super computer in our pocket. I think that will happen with almost every type of technology. It'll be very difficult to keep any of it under some type of centralized control. I think, I think that's what's happening. It
Vance Crowe 20:41
for a long time, it looked like that was not the case, right until Elon Musk bought X. It looked like all of these social media platforms were being ultimately used against us, right in this like panopticon, where you didn't realize you were within a system, like when COVID happened, my podcast, growing, growing, growing, growing, and then I had a guy on it was the height of my podcast was where he was talking about how he knew for certain that there were people that had COVID that didn't have symptoms. And he was like, just because you get COVID doesn't mean you're gonna die, right? And he knew about this before, and then you can go look at my statistics, right? All of a sudden, YouTube just plummets all the way down, and there was never any recovery after that, right? It was like there was definitely being held down in some way. And I was always embarrassed to say this, because I mentioned it to my wife where I was like, This is so bizarre, but I don't want to be the guy that's like, people aren't listening to me because I'm being censored well, and now, you know, you fast forward, you know, three or four years, you're like, Oh no, they were absolutely doing that. There's like, clearly the government was involved in it. The companies themselves were doing it. And until Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into x, it was, it looked like it was all heading towards centralization, and there's no way out of this. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 22:04
but Elon bought X, you know, I think that's the point. Like, all it takes is one hole in the bucket. You can put a lot of power, a lot of control, a lot of authority in there, but at some point, you know, somebody's gonna poke a hole in the bucket, and I don't think they can put the genie back in the bottle. Now, you know, I mean, x, can you imagine if we didn't have x? Right now, we wouldn't be talking about those 35 getting shipped to Ukraine. They'd be there already for one you know that that was shocking. It's hard to ignore them having like FBI office space in meta headquarters. What?
Vance Crowe 22:43
Yeah, and those fucking losers that were actually being like, here, let me get you an office and whatever. And you can hear, you hear Zuckerberg and these guys be like, well, I they were gonna take away my company, or they were gonna, you know, they put pressure on me, but somebody had to come along and poke a hole in it. And Elon did, like, no matter what, he took the biggest gamble in our lifetime, I think, of any single human being. Because if Kamala Harris would have won, who knows what would have happened to Elon Musk, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 23:15
well, we're not out of the woods yet, you know? I mean, what's the date today? We're recording this podcast, you know, it's, it's gonna be, I expect it'll be an interesting next 60 days. How long do we got until January, 20.
Vance Crowe 23:29
You think assassinations?
Ryan Cooper 23:30
I mean, there we've had two of them. You know, isn't it so crazy to say, so
Vance Crowe 23:37
weird, like, and like, as soon as I say that, I guarantee there was somebody listening and being like, oh, man, Vance has jumped the shark. You're talking about assassinations? Like, yeah. Well, not only did they happen, they also got memory hold. And nobody talks about them, and we don't think about it, but like, absolutely could have happened. And like, throughout history, this is the way of things, right? When power starts getting threatened, they do kill people at the top? Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 24:02
yeah, people. There's like, real consequences to this game. Now, you know, so I'll use that to go back to our farming, because I had some questions for you. I have ended up in this, like, very deep rabbit hole of, you know, sovereign farming, regenerative agriculture, small communities, hyper localism. Let's produce food locally and distribute it. And it is. It's really hard. It's like what we were just talking about. It would be awesome if I had some you know, company, some Tyson, you know, to kind of come in and just kind of map the logistics and handle the pickup and the delivery and but then you see what that does to one the end consumer. I think there's a lot of highlight on that right now. You know, we got RFK out there talking about, you know, maybe they're being a little too much for. Die in our cereal. I guess my wife wouldn't let me feed our kids cereal, so I don't know, but I there's that side where the consumers don't seem to be getting what they are wanting, or maybe they're getting what they're wanting, but they're too stupid and uneducated. And I don't mean that that Americans in general are stupid uneducated. I think we're being kept stupid, and we're not being educated about how important food is. I think that's my opinion. And then on the other side, it's just destroying, like the low the American farmer, you know, I we help a dairy farmer who switched to being a, like a fresh dairy, raw dairy, in 2021 because they hadn't, they hadn't had, like, a price hike on their their milk by the 100 pound in 20 or 30 years, you know, and so, so this, this, this large collective that we're talking about, this centralized pot of money that's, you Know, managed and controlled and able to hire truck drivers and put together distribution to another state. That Collective is crushing the American farmer. It seems it's also not bringing food to market at least as much as people think it is. If we talk to a typical farmer, they're like, you know, we feed the world. It's like, No, you grow ethanol, you know? So I I'm sorry, I have, have ended up around a whole bunch of conspiratorial, ag related people who are trying to blaze a different way and having a really hard time at it. You know, farmers markets like, look great on Instagram, but it's really hard to build. You know, a three family supporting business on a farmers market. So then I heard you on barn talk and you, you seem to have a really balanced view of what centralized companies like Monsanto have done to help local farmers and American farmers develop a product, take a product to market, be Part of that that. Call it the food stack. How do you, how do you parse like the the the downsides with the upsides. Do you think that they're, they're fixable? Do you think, do you think that the solution is to to, to have large megalithic corporations kind of organize all this, but maybe under a better incentive structure. What's your thoughts there? And was that cohesive? Do
Vance Crowe 27:50
you understand? I mean, so I don't think the future that we want to live in is one that is responding to the incentives that are there. And so the biggest incentives right now, as far as I'm concerned, and I talked about this on X over the weekend, and some people will cheer you on, and some people will be like, What are you doing? Like, I thought you were on our team. The first one is the ethanol mandates in the United States are the most absurd thing on the face in the United States, because what they are is, like in certain states, they'll say, you have to blend this much ethanol into your gasoline, and that's the only thing you're allowed to sell your you gas station are not allowed to sell something, you know, your your petroleum based product, without us adding some corn into it, and that takes up 40% of the Corn. Well, there's no difference between doing that and just walking up to every single American that travels on any form of transportation that, I guess, that uses gasoline, and saying, like, Here, give me, give me a little bit of your money. I'm gonna just take a little bit of that money, right? It's insane. Well, I'm gonna give me
Ryan Cooper 28:57
a little bit of that money. I take a little bit of that money, and then I'm going to use that pot of money to go out and control American farmers, or at least, kind of dictate market conditions in some degree, right? Yeah,
Vance Crowe 29:09
I mean, to make it so the market situation is so distorted that it's very, very difficult for somebody say, you know, I'm going to bring in a different kind of corn. I'm going to bring in, I'm going to bring in a different product that I want to bring to market, because there's so much momentum going towards elevators and the logistics systems and everything that makes that ethanol work, and the feed stocks for, you know, feeding cattle that that whole system. So if somebody says, Hey, I believe that we could do a new thing with okra, or we could do a new, new thing with pick your whatever vegetable. That system just isn't there, because all of the money, all of the safety, is going that way. And then the second, the other big one is subsidized crop insurance, which is bat shit insane. It is like, hey, if. You can get several years of your crop up to whatever you know, this median production. So you do five years, then we know, on average, your farm produces this many acres. If you ever produce less than that, then we will write you a check, and you'll get that money right. And this makes it so the it would be fine if that were a private insurance system, but the fact that it is subsidized by the federal government means that you're not actually insuring at the rate of which people take collections off of it. You've distorted that market, and so now all of the bigger players can never lose as long as you keep doing your corn and soybeans you are never, ever going to lose, and you have that land, and as long as you can just keep making those payments, then everything's fine. So without removing those two things, and probably the CRP system as well, that that one's more technically complicated, no, we will not break free from the system that we have, and I don't think it will be possible to make a healthier food system. And like, I don't think farmers are setting out to not produce the food that they want. But I told you, I was at this park the other day with my daughters. Literally every single person at that park was obese. Literally every single one that was like 35 people, yeah, something is horribly, horribly wrong. And it's not that people are lazy or bad. It's that the food that is available to them, in the quantities and the flavors and the whatever, is clearly wrong, which is why I went from being like, RFK is a dangerous quack. He says all kinds of crazy things to me being like, you know what, I'm willing to try something new. Like, I'm definitely, you know, like, I think we should build up another system and jump over to it rather than tear it all down. But something needs to change, because, you know, people that I'm even close to, people that I know love their kids and are trying to feed them well, have obese kids, and it's, it's, there's something really deeply sad and wrong about that, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 32:04
yeah, there's a lot of people don't even know how, you know, a lot of people don't know how to, how to feed their kids healthy. I mean, they, they've legitimately been lied to, I think, by this food pyramid for a long, long time. You know,
Vance Crowe 32:21
it's very sad. Well, you got into farming and then named your ranch in your Bitcoin Ranch, yeah. What's that all about? Yeah?
Ryan Cooper 32:28
Well, we, we keep all of our excess funds in Bitcoin. I'm, I've, like, opted out of the American dollar. So you asked a little bit ago, you call this a collapse, you know, it's kind of scary. I do think it's a collapse. I think it's a monetary collapse, and I think it's going as slowly as possible, which, which is probably a good thing for us. I think we saw a big part of it in 2008 and then we've seen, like, glimpses of it ever since then, as we kind of push the envelope off. But you know, if, if our I spent a lot of time sitting around thinking about money when I was a sales and finance manager, you know, it's just like all of your daily goals, everything that you do, is denominated by some type of, you know, some type of money, salesman's pay or dealership compensation. And you really kind of get this behind the scenes view of what money is at a at a corporate level. And if I spent some time thinking about this, if I if my great, great grandfather had worked really hard in his young years, you know the there's a proverb that says you should, you should, like, carry heavy weights when you're young. You know you should work hard when you're young, while you have youth. And if he had worked extra hard and sacrificed time away from his family when he was in his early 20s, and he he saved a little bit of that money, and he wanted to pass it on to me as an inheritance. If he thought about me his great, great grandkid, and he saved that money in the past 100 years, if he saved that money in US dollars, he probably was able to save, like a couple bucks back then and transport that to me, and now I could buy, like a Snickers bar, like maybe, you know, we the thes 99% of its value. It's actually 99.9% of its value over the past 100 years. And none of us really think about that. We just kind of operate as if, you know, 2% inflation, 2% of our money is buying power kind of getting slipped away every year. Is is nominal. You know, none of us should be worried about it, but 99% of my great, great grandpa's wealth that he was able to store up has been stolen from him by now. So, so we're in some form of collapse. You. And it's exhilarating now. I mean, we can, if you buy eggs, you know, since 2019 you'd know, you know, if you buy, if you buy collectible baseball cards or land or gold or anything of real value, that's not easy to produce with ever evolving technology, then you realize, like, wow, my money, it's it's not, it's not worth it's worth less. Worth less means it's worth less constantly, like, year to year now, month to month. And because of that, it's a terrible way to save. It's a horrible way to save. But we're all lied to, like with the food pyramid, and we're told, Hey, if you got some extra money when you're a young, young person, take it down to your bank, stick it in, you know, a CD or a Roth IRA, and we're gonna, you know, loan it out to somebody else. And you don't really understand what's going on. You just get told, Well, this is how you build wealth over time, but it's not working man. I mean, it's broken. And I talked to a lot of people about this, if people don't see that it's broken, then they they just can't, they can't see that it's broken, but it's it's destroying most working Americans, people on fixed incomes are suffering right now. Our homelessness is skyrocketing. I mean, people are literally starting because of this problem. And I think the only way out now is for us to find a new money and that's not as radical of a thing to say as it probably strikes a lot of us when we first hear it, because we as humans, we've been choosing new money over and over again every time the money was manipulated and used against us throughout time. You know, every couple 100 years, it seems, throughout history, the money was taken control of by some centralized authority, and then it was manipulated and used to steal against the people. And eventually people realize, like, oh my gosh, this money is just not worth anything anymore. And they go out and they find a new money. So that's what, that's what, that's what I did, and we, as a business, as a farm, we keep all of our, all of our, all of our funds in Bitcoin, anything that we're not going to operate with, like month to month, first
Vance Crowe 37:33
thing somebody is going to bring up with you is the volatility of it. I mean, right now you got to be feeling that volatility go up, up, up, up, but, but, like, there's other times, you know, when it drops from 60 down to 20 now, all of a sudden, you've lost two thirds of the buying power of that. How has your business been able to handle that volatility? Well, like
Ryan Cooper 37:52
I said, we keep our operating funds in the local currency right now, it's the US dollar.
Vance Crowe 37:58
I like that in
Ryan Cooper 37:59
the local currency. Yeah, rural Americans love the United States dollar issued by the Federal Reserve. But anything, anything beyond that, we we save in Bitcoin, and then we also, we offer, we offer 5% discounts if anybody pays in Bitcoin, to try to encourage local usage of Bitcoin in our area, and some people like that. Some people have no idea what we're talking about. But then that Bitcoin, you know, kind of goes into our Bitcoin reserves. It gets put in cold storage, and it's, it's, its intention is to be left there for for 100 years as Bitcoin Ranch, our ranching endeavor grows. So it's a real long term play. The frequency of the up and down doesn't matter so much to us. We've been doing this for three years, and our Bitcoin Treasury is up 100%
Vance Crowe 38:52
Yeah, I'm the same way. So I offer a 15% discount on legacy interviews if you'll pay in Bitcoin. So cool. And then what I do is, like, if you pay into that, then I just don't touch it. I don't pay any money out of it. Like, I'll just, like, basically, it's like, we're doing that for free. And so so far, that's been by far the best investment I've made. Like, the money that I've made in that account is just killing it. And even if it doesn't over the short to medium term, it has no bearing on my business. It's, it's like, it's been very, very effective.
Ryan Cooper 39:25
Yeah, it's, it's kind of a fun experiment to do it that way. In my experience, when you, when you take money, you think, Oh, I'm gonna go buy bitcoin with this. It usually doesn't happen. Something comes up and you end up needing that cash or something, at least at the point in the business we're at, you know, which is, you know, like that three year struggle, Mark, you know, just, just forced entrepreneurial spirit keeping things alive. So
Vance Crowe 39:51
when we do the amazing, have you found people willing to pay you in Bitcoin? Man,
Ryan Cooper 39:55
it's shocking. It's shocking where we find Bitcoiners, really. Then I've sold hay for Bitcoin. We sell milk for Bitcoin every week. Whole bunch, whole bunch of Bitcoiners buy their, their fresh milk and Bitcoin beef eggs. You know, I don't know if we've done any, how many projects, a dozen eggs? Dude, I don't even know. I don't handle it. I don't, I, I'm, I'm, like the boots on the ground. Guy, so I have a business partner, Scott. Scott is incredible. I think you may have got an opportunity to meet Scott at some point, but Scott's retired Chief Technical Officer of a financial institution here in St Louis. He's way over qualified to be helping me build a pharmacist company and a ranch, but he is man, and so he handles, he handles all of our, all of our, our payments and things like that, and a lot of our deliveries.
Vance Crowe 40:52
When I think about the SATs, that's the the thing that brings, I think, makes people feel more comfortable with Bitcoin, because I've just realized this, like at $100,000 which were right at that line. It's almost 100k It's like $1 will buy you 1000 sets. Yeah. And what's crazy to think about is someday we may be at one set equals $1 parody. And so this like buying 1000 SATs for $1 feels like a hell of a deal, right? Because I think a lot of times people think like, I don't have $100,000 to buy a Bitcoin, and that's the only unit of measurement that they know about. But when you start being like, oh, every dollar I put in, I get 1000 Satoshis, like that, all of a sudden starts feeling a lot better, and you don't have to be worried, like, do I have one whole Bitcoin, right?
Ryan Cooper 41:45
Yeah, yeah, the one whole Bitcoin thing, it is, it is kind of a hump for people to get past. When I first introduced to Bitcoin, and it's 2024 I still bump into people all the time who have never heard a Bitcoin. No idea. I'm just clueless. You know, I was talking to fire a couple weeks ago, and, you know, stopped in his tractor, and he said something. I said, Well, you know, you can always pay him Bitcoin. He said, What's Bitcoin? Orange pill on this dude inside of a John Deere tractor. But, you know, I I also don't think people are ready for Bitcoin, if they're not ready for Bitcoin, you know? I mean, unless you realize you
Vance Crowe 42:26
have to stripped away. I heard sailors say the Michael Saylor say this the other day, and I was like, You know what? That's actually totally right. You have to perceive that something is wrong with the US dollar for you to be able to even be open to the idea of Bitcoin. And that was one of those, like, necessary but not sufficient conditions that I just didn't understand. It's like, if you think the US dollar is like, hey, it's doing, look, it's the strongest in the world, and everything's good. And look how successful I have been with it, or my family has been with it. Then, then you don't see it. It isn't until you start being like, hey, it used to be that if I had $250,000 in the bank, like, that was a lot of money. I was gonna be able to buy a house with that, or I was gonna be able to pass that on to my kids. And now, all of a sudden, $250,000 doesn't seem like that much money. Then all of a sudden you're like, Well, wait, why? Why is that not very much money? And what's going on there. And once you start asking yourself, what went wrong with the money? Or then you're more open to finding some different system. But you have to first perceive, and I remember when when Rob and I you met Rob, good friend of mine, when we were first talking about Bitcoin, more than 10 years ago, we would go to places, and we would only use inflation when talking about places like Venezuela, because people just like they couldn't comprehend that the American inflation that at the time we were being told was two and a half percent, it was probably closer to four or 5% but they would be like, No, I'm told that we have to have inflation. If we don't, then, you know, then things will just keep getting cheaper, and that that wouldn't work. We need things to get more expensive over time, which is like this totally backwards, bizarre thing. And it's only now that people have watched inflation skyrocket, but still have this insane belief that it's ever going to stop, yeah, right, like that. We're ever really going to get it down to 2% that the Fed can somehow get into the into the driver's seat and be able to control it. There's it's not stopping. It's going to continue accelerating. Yeah, it's
Ryan Cooper 44:26
going to continue to accelerate. And so if people didn't perceive a problem, you know, in 2020 maybe they're perceiving a problem. Now, if they don't perceive the problem now, I bet you they're going to perceive it in four years. You know, I was talking to a construction friend of mine, and again, we're in like, small, rural America, he told me. He said people used to come to me with $400,000 and want to build their dream house. He's now, now I'm not sure I can get started. Whoa, you know that's crazy, man. It's crazy so it affects. It affects everything, especially affects the farms, you know. And you you see, you see farms get sold and broken up, and, you know, farmers don't, don't want to see their farm broken up and developed, you know. But when they pass away, what are their kids supposed to do? This is a failed business. This thing does not produce anything. It is a, you know, we watched it suck the life out of our death, you know, for the end of his life, and and, and none of us really want to take time from our town jobs to come out and feed cattle. So especially if we're not paying to do it, we're not going to do it as a hobby. And so I guess that'll just get worse and worse and worse, unless, unless people start to change to a different money, you know, and and, you know, there's always the conversation about gold. People say, like, oh, you know, I can, you know, we can, we can use gold. But the truth is, in my opinion, we've moved to a digital age. We are in a digital age, you know, I don't even know how I'm supposed to take gold in exchange for some eggs or milk? You know? I mean, I, I don't know. Like, am I supposed to weigh it? You know? Like, none of that really makes sense, but I, we take, we accept SATs all the time.
Vance Crowe 46:14
Okay, if you are still here, that means you both know about legacy interviews, and you've heard me talk about Bitcoin, and if you're a bitcoiner, then let me offer you something that's going to be really easy for you. And if you've never used Bitcoin before, I'd like to use this as a way to both help you take one small step into Bitcoin, but also to get this incredibly valuable gift of a legacy interview for your loved ones. If you have been thinking about doing this, and you'd like to save 15% which is the most discount we ever give. And that's because I want to make this step easy. You can go to legacy interviews.com/bitcoin and there you will see a form that you can fill out that will let us know that you want us to have a conversation about your loved ones and the legacy interviews that you're thinking about, but also to receive a 15% discount if you will pay in Bitcoin. If you've been thinking about doing this for a long time, you've been wondering, Hey, how could I make this legacy interview happen? Even if you're not interested in Bitcoin at all, this is a great way to save a little bit of money and to dip your toe in just a little bit. All right, let's head back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper. The challenge of people getting online with Bitcoin seems insurmountable until you start talking about farms and people involved in agriculture, because there are so many people now that can look at that farm and say, Well, if I take over mom and dad's farm, the utility value, the amount of money that we're making by working this land is nowhere close to what that land is valued at, right? What you could go out and get paid for. And for so long, people would look at that and say, Oh, you sold mom and dad or grandma and granddad's farm. Like, how could you that's the family heritage? Well, if you look at it, you're making a rational decision. Like, it's completely rational decision. But this is not better for agriculture, that we keep having to sell off land, that the value of that the price of that land, is so far above the utility value, is not good for anyone and and what I say, I see this all the time. I said it to a group of Farm Credit bankers like there will come a day when, as Bitcoin becomes more and more ubiquitous, all of a sudden, these hedge funds and these family wealth offices and these groups that are spending all this money to pump it into land. They're gonna realize, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I can get the Val The reason they're putting it into land is because it's scarce. And because it's scarce, they know you can inflate it away. The value as the value of the dollars go down, the price of that land goes up, and so they stay at parity. But if they once, they realize, wait a second, I don't actually have to own that land and pay property tax on it and pay some farmer to be on there and worry about the liability. I can just put that in Bitcoin. Well, then suddenly we may watch the price of land plummet. Now, there's all these people be like, No, I don't want that, right? That'd be terrible. But the closer we can get land prices to the utility value, the more likely we are to have people that can diversify and make choices and get away from this insurance system and the ethanol system and produce all sorts of rich and interesting and diverse crops. But none of that happens until we get off of the dollar standard and move towards the Bitcoin standard.
Ryan Cooper 49:38
Yeah. Man, we went we went down the rabbit hole really fast here, if you do have listeners who are Bitcoiners, but it's a really hopeful future what you just described, and that's the collapse I think we're in, by the way. You know, the dollar system sucks. I mean, it sucks for almost everybody, except the unproductive the. A there's like, there's like, this class of unproductive bureaucrats in our society. And, you know, I could start naming the occupations, but I don't want to piss any of my friends off. There's, there's, like, this whole layer of paperwork doers and lawyers. I'll name some of you and and in, you know, whole industries built around not really producing anything. They help organize something, or help plan something, or help you navigate the absurd tax code, or whatever, whatever that may be. And I think, I think a lot of those jobs are probably going to be replaced by AI here real soon. And being a productive member of society, somebody who's who's like putting bricks on top of bricks, or or building a house, or installing the plumbing. I think those, those places in our our collective, are gonna be valued way higher in in what I think that does is, I think it turns us into a society of builders again, and not a society of investors. You know, because right now, like, you go out and you work real hard, you make some money, and then you realize, like, oh, the hardest part of this is actually keeping the money, like it's keeping the purchasing power of this money. And that's all too complicated for you. So you kind of, you hire this, like, thick layer of bureaucrats to you got your financial advisor to invest your money. You got insurance agent to buy your insurance. You got all of these, like, jobs while you go out and you try to do the layman's job and stack bricks on top of bricks. But that system is crushing the current American worker. Like, right now, you know, I mean, so like, right now, if you're a Wall Street banker, you've probably done a lot better over the past four years than if you you know you're, like, doing plumbing in st St Louis. Does that make sense?
Vance Crowe 52:12
Yeah. I mean, I think plumbers are doing pretty well, but I take your point on the like, if you were trying to be a server or a waiter or whatever, like, no, that's kept up.
Ryan Cooper 52:21
Part of the reason plumbers are doing real well right now is because we're actually, we're working our way through the collapse like right now, sir, people who can actually do things are being valued higher and higher in our economy as more and more of the like spreadsheet jobs go away. But what I think, what I think will be the real driver is, like you said, as as a lot of the things that have been valued before, like houses, like the idea that, you know, young guys, young girls should go out, work hard, save up, buy a house, and that's going to be like, your that's going to be your wealth storage for a long time, like, that's probably going to be over. You're not going to use land or homes as stores of wealth. They're going to become utility. There's gonna be a utility cost, magnificent.
Vance Crowe 53:06
I mean, like, think about the houses we could live in and the and they like, the the beauty that you could put into things. Like, people wonder, like, how is it that, if we're in this wonderful technological era, all of our buildings suck, right? Like they we build them for as cheap as possible. You look at a church now, right? Like a church goes to get built, and they build it out of Morton building material. It's a pole barn, yeah, it's and it's like, there's nothing lasting about it. It's nothing. And the reason they're doing that is because the value of the dollars are so quickly falling out, out of the bottom. Yeah, the end and so without when you think about the possibility of moving to a money system where the amount of money, this is the most beautiful and single beginning stage of understanding bitcoin is, there will only ever be 21 million. That's it. There's only 21 million Bitcoin. Now you can divide those into all these Satoshis, which is, you know, we can all have access to this money, but you can't make more of it. And you were talking about gold earlier. I read over the weekend, China found some enormous gold reserves, and it's like two and a half percent of the overall supply they just have now added into the gold market. Well, that is going to plummet the price. And as the price of gold goes up, people can just go mine more gold, right? You're like, oh, okay, now we can pay those steam shovels to go out there and go get more gold. It does not matter with Bitcoin, how high that price goes. There cannot be more of them and and so this is, like, something that is truly unique and beautiful. And I was in a little bit of a back and forth with my brother over the weekend, and I was saying, like, the beauty of Bitcoin is its scarcity. And he's like, Well, I don't understand why scarcity is valuable. And I'm like, well, name one thing that is, um. I'm rare, that is not valuable, right? Like, you could say, well, my children's painting, right? Okay, that's fine. But, like, but like, you know, the reason sand is not valuable is because it's not rare. The reason that it depends if water is scarce and you need it, then it's very, very valuable. If it's not scarce, then it isn't but with Bitcoin, the scarcity is implicit in the system, and as more and more people begin to see its value, as the demand goes up, but you can't increase the supply, the value is going to go up. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 55:33
and hopefully that will, that will drive, like a devaluation of a lot of things in the world. That's what I'm really trying to say, whether it's land or houses or degrees, that the the the amount, the reason all of our churches suck right now is because everything's being stolen from us. I really believe that all of the productivity that has happened over the past decades, you know, of technological advancement, all of that wealth has been stolen from us and turned into battleships or, or paid, you know, a whole bunch of federal turbines, wind turbines, you know, or or ethanol production, you just gets lost in this, like massive things. And we keep getting poorer and poorer and poorer, so much so that we can't even afford our grandparents farms anymore, and that's the truth of it. We can't afford our grandparents farms anymore, and they've made all of these. They've made all they've taken all of that wealth and used it to subsidize a whole bunch of jobs that don't actually produce anything. Which means that if I just want to be a farmer like I can't, I can't get going fast enough to keep up with just the ever running away costs as all this like investment money comes in and invests in the farms and the equipment, the Ag culture and the infrastructure and the elevators, you know what I mean. And so if we had a way to, yeah, store up if our money, you know, was the S, p5, 100, you know, and it wasn't, it wasn't losing this 10% every year, then I might be able to store it in that and go and trade that one day for for land anyways.
Vance Crowe 57:16
Well, and I resent it so deeply that you like when it used to be when we were kids, you'd be like, All right, we're gonna go open a savings account. Now it wasn't actually at all that good of a financial decision to go, you know, open a savings account, because you weren't going to get an interest rate that was as high as inflation. But now you make money, you've got to go invested into the stock market, because if you don't, then that money is just going to be burned through. Why don't people look around and be like, Hey, man, fuck you. Why do I have to do this? Like, I don't want to have to invest in these companies. And the insane thing about the stock market is we set it up so that a certain percentage of your paycheck gets pulled out of it, and then we drop it in, usually in index funds, right where then people are like, Oh, the way that I get listed on this index fund is I follow these sustainability metrics, these dei metrics. I do whatever I've got to do, so that every week, on Friday afternoon, at two o'clock, we get just a showered with money, which continues to make our valuations go up. But these companies are not they're not honed to make money. They're honed to pull in investments, as opposed to selling something that's valuable.
Ryan Cooper 58:28
Yeah, they're not honed to be productive. They're not they're not honed to build things. They're honed to invest in this very manipulated, strange market that's laid out in front of them. You
Vance Crowe 58:39
know, when you think about this collapse, what is your time frame? Do you think? You know, how does Bitcoin do over time?
Ryan Cooper 58:48
Well, I think the US dollar is probably going to lose about 10% a year for the foreseeable future. And I mean that like if you're not trying to buy rice krispies, and you're trying to buy, you know, a bar of gold or a collectible baseball card or an acre of land. Yeah, I think we're, I think we're probably, you're probably gonna see like, a 10% loss in purchasing power per year for a while. I think, you know Michael Saylor, you know, he's modeled this out pretty well. You know, he models Bitcoin at, I think, $13 million by 2040 and I don't know what portion of that is the collapse the US dollar, and what portion of that is, you know, the absolute scarcity of there being 21 million Bitcoin ever anymore. But what it does for me is it gives me a money I can save in and I can I can be an entrepreneur. I can work hard, and whatever little bit that I can save up, I can store it in this new economy, and it will be there, I believe, to catch my family and my community and my. Farm, while the old, the old one collapsed a little bit, you know, people are going to pay more and more for fertilizer. We're not even in a hot war yet, but we'll see by tomorrow. You know, things, the inputs on farming are going to go up, up, up, up. And I'm, I'm not sure where the other side of the equation is going to come in from, unless, unless farmers, you know, take an ego check, you know, think, hey, maybe, maybe our Grandpas were bamboozled a little bit by, you know, a converted federal government that pivoted from, you know, winning World War Two to, you know, farming and running the USDA back here. Maybe we were fed a load of garbage on some points. They definitely lied about the food pyramid. They seem to have not been completely honest about the money. You know, let's, uh, let's look at some of these things with fresh eyes. Man, that's kind of what I try to push all of our local farmers to do.
Vance Crowe 1:00:59
What do you think this new administration is going to do regarding the economy? Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 1:01:04
I I have big hopes. I have big hopes. I don't think any of this stuff is going to get fixed from the top down Vance. I don't I think, I think, I think we're going to have to fix it from the ground up. I think, you know, families will have to fix it for the family. Communities will have to fix it for their community. I think we haven't gotten into local politics at all. But you know, I've spent the past probably three, four years going to a lot of my local politic meetings and trying to get to know as many of as many of my local governance as possible, my local share, my county commissioners, my mayor and and they're not thinking about this stuff, man. I mean, the the emails that their corporation is sending them is like, hey, you know, just make sure the roads get taken care of. And here's some federal grants you can apply for. And nobody's thinking like, hey, you know, where's the electricity come from? If, if, if there's a statewide electrical issue, you know, a problem getting utilities turned on. Who do we call? Who do we, who do we handle for that? Those aren't, those aren't the problems that they think they're even supposed to fix, you know? So a lot of times it's not. It's not that there's like, bad people making a lot of these decisions. They just, they don't, they don't even realize that there's that there's the authority for them to take up, to challenge the problem. You know what? I mean, the they're kind of having their problems dictated to him and and so I'm hoping that this, this, this new administration fixes a lot, but we're in a lot of trouble. Regardless, there's no, there's no undoing 10% purchasing power lost a year because of, you know what, 40% of the currency being printed in the past four years. Yeah.
Vance Crowe 1:03:00
And the best example is, if your city is making its income from property tax, right, you can just continue to ratchet up how valuable those houses are, but nothing says that people can continue to pay that No. And so then they can't pay their property taxes, so then they have to pack up and leave.
Ryan Cooper 1:03:17
And no, they're not pack up and leave. Then you as a city have to go in and remove your park benches so that those people don't sleep in the park. There you go. Yeah, that's really what's happening. That's right, you know these local communities, if you think of your town or your county as a as a community, and you realize what the leaders of community, the problems that they're working on are like bike paths and the new grant for the fire station not how can we maintain the infrastructure that we paid for with federal grant money that's now falling apart? If the federal money isn't there to replace it or repair it, it's going to crumble. And that's really what you're happening seeing happen across rural America. So, I mean, if RFK comes in, I hope he does what you just said, hopefully listens to your podcast, and and, and it starts to bring, bring land down to the cost of of of its usage. But, you know, at the end of the day, if, if rural America, I live in a, you know, 87,000 population County. Most of the people in my county barely know how to farm. Don't know how to cook, you know, don't know how to educate their families. Don't know how to communicate with each other without, you know, Facebook, text messaging, most of them, you know, most of them, are going to have a real hard time. And it's kind of, it's, there's this, you know, you hear like the man, if the world goes to hell, I'm gonna go hunting, you know. Or, you know, we got cows out in the field. People have no idea how far they are away from food by having cows out in the field, you know. I mean, you know, do you have. Local packing plants, you know, do we? We actually opened up a local packing plant in Farmington, and it was like an ant. It was a literal answer to prayer, because we all realize, hey, we have these local farms. If we got to ship our cattle and we, you know, and diesel goes to $8 a gallon, you know, what are we going to do?
Vance Crowe 1:05:17
Oh, man, that's, uh, another big thing. So on x this weekend, I mentioned the the different things. I thought, you know, getting rid of ethanol mandates. CRP, gotta go crop insurance. But the, the biggest one, the one that would make us healthiest, the fastest, is just get rid of all USDA inspection. Just, there's none of that. Yeah, and that way, if you decide that you're going to slaughter a cow and you want to sell that to somebody that's over on the other side of the Mississippi River, fine, yeah, there's like, that's okay. That's between you and that other person. But the USDA getting in there, and they're, you know, giving their special blessing as they stand beside it, like the people that believe that the USDA is making our food any healthier are delusional. They are putting in so many rules so that you're sitting there, just like people are focused on the bike paths instead of like, how are we gonna have water mains that don't have lead in them? Yeah, it's the exact same thing with the USDA. It's like, how are you gonna fill out this form, and do you have that RFID tag, as opposed to like, Hey, can we have as decentralized of processing as possible so that small farms can take their animals in, get them butchered and sell the meat locally? You
Ryan Cooper 1:06:29
hear about this battery plant that caught fire down in Fredericktown, Missouri, lithium, oh, yeah, vaguely, yeah. That's like in my backyard and, and it's, it's a great example of what local government does when under pressure. You know, you get to you get to see like the local characters, your sheriff and your commissioners and you know the city administrator. You know, you get to see how they respond when there's a bad situation. And I don't actually live in Fredericktown. I live in Farmington, up the road, but all that smoke like blew over our farms, and you can, you know the these, these local elected officials, they don't have much use, in my opinion, until it's time to push back on bullies, you know. And this court, you know, Corporation came in, built this factory. Don't exactly know what happened, but it caught fire, killed two and a half miles of fish in the community, yeah. And, and, you know, we there was a there was a meeting that just got leaked, and the lawyers from the Corporation had come in to meet with some of the county officials. But not all of them, not some of the more friendly ones, in my opinion. But I nobody is coming to save these small communities. Man, you know, we've seen it happen in Hawaii. We saw it happen in Palestine, Ohio. I don't think Fredericktown, Missouri is as bad as those things. But when, when something bad does happen in your in your your community, I think people are going to pretty much be on their own, you know? I don't think any new federal office is going to fix that, you know? Yeah,
Vance Crowe 1:08:21
because the only reason right now the federal government can swoop in and do anything is because they have no controls on the amount of money that they they can do absolutely whatever they want. Yeah, they can print as much money as they want. But if you're a local government and you decide, all right, we're gonna pull out all the stops and help all of our citizenry, oh, now we can't pay for our police. Oh, now we've taken all the money out to to pay for these other things, and there aren't reserves out there. I mean, there was some stuff on x about how there's been all these accounting games that have been done by these cities and counties to be able to make their numbers work, but they're way, way, way in the hole, and it's going to be incredible to see how it plays out. I have to have a dose of humility here, because I have not run for office. I don't go to community meetings. To me, I tried when I first moved to St Louis to go to some of these local meetings, and I was like, this is such a complete and colossal waste of time. And now that I have, you know, kids and a business, and my wife has a business, and we don't have any time. Like, I can't imagine being like, Okay, now I'm gonna go take some time
Ryan Cooper 1:09:27
tuesday at 10. Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous, but yeah, it probably feels ridiculous to people in that room too. What you realize real fast if you go to like, four of those meetings, is the moment you cross the threshold, you're in a room with people who, 90% of them are paid to be there. You know, they work for this company, the state. You know, they work for this team. And when you cross the threshold, you kind of become an advocate of the state. You know? I mean, it's like, no, like, hey. I know that problem over there is the government's fault, but you don't understand, my little department is like doing good in the world. We need a little extra funding, you know, and whatever you can do to get that, and it's, it's just, yeah, dude, as long as it has endless funding, it will do whatever nonsense it wants. And eventually he put enough non productive people in roles of authority and give them unlimited resources, and they will start, I've just noticed this recently, they will start to mistake the sent resources as the solution to the problem. So Biden tweeted two or three days ago and said, You know, I'm he, I'm sure he's not the one tweeting, but his, his Twitter account comes out with, you know, we promised X number of billion dollars delivered to fight climate change, and we exceeded that. We sent this many billion dollars for climate change. And I just read that tweet, like, three times, like, Yeah, but, and then you realize, Oh no, this, this is the that this is the solution well,
Vance Crowe 1:11:06
and this is my money produces exactly what it's designed to produce. And that is what they were like. We told you we were going to distribute your the money that we either took from from people and directly from their taxes, or how we inflated away their money, and we gave it away to people that are on our team, that are that are saying they're fighting climate change. So it did exactly what they said they were going to do. Yeah, well, man, I could talk with you all day, but we got to wrap up. But before we do How are you doing local food? Tell people where they can learn about what you're doing. And, yeah, take something away from it.
Ryan Cooper 1:11:42
Yeah, we have a website, milk, bend farms, Alliance, calm. And we just deliver primarily milk off our dairy farm. But we do eggs when, you know, winter months gets tough on eggs, so you have to, you have to order a week ahead of time. And then, you know, local beef and pork, and really, whatever our our local farmers can contribute we and then we do a weekly Friday to your door delivery, and we've got one route going up to St Charles. So if there's anybody between St Charles and Fredericktown, let us know. Great man.
Vance Crowe 1:12:15
Well, thank you so much for coming down.
Ryan Cooper 1:12:17
Thank you so much, dude. Appreciate it. Hey. That
Vance Crowe 1:12:19
was great. Yeah, that was fun.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:21
You?
It's so much fun. I was watching my two year old son this morning. He He like, climbed up on our coffee table, which already seemed a little risky to me, and then looked at me and with like, a bunch of excitement, and then without breaking eye contact, he jumped off the coffee table.
Vance Crowe 0:18
I know this exactly like where my daughter, my second is, like, she just totally believes that you're gonna catch her, even if you are not aware that she is gonna jump. It's just 100% faith in you.
Ryan Cooper 0:30
Yeah, it's, it's the best thing. There's nothing better than raising kids. I think. You know,
Vance Crowe 0:35
I had an experience just this weekend. I took my daughters to this the World Bird Sanctuary. I don't know if you've ever been there. Oh, man, it's great for kids, because you can get, like, within, you know, four or five feet of a giant bald eagle or a, you know, just different raptors and emus and stuff. Anyway, we get done, and there's a playground. So the little my kids want to go, it's four year old and two year old, and my two year old gets kind of run over by these older boys, and my four year old climbs up a ladder and like, demands that the the bigger boy, a boy that's a lot bigger than her, apologizes to the younger sister. And I'm like, that's in there. Like, I didn't teach her that. I didn't, I didn't, you know, tell her, Hey, you should do these things. It was just in her Yeah. And then this morning, before I left for work, I was like, Hey, let me talk to you for a second, like, if you're ever defending your sister, whatever you think is the right thing. No, I'll back you up. There's 100% that's awesome. And she was like, I know that's my job. I'm the oldest. And I'm like, That's just in there. There's something I didn't teach that that was ingrained.
Ryan Cooper 1:34
Yeah. So my, my eight year old son is real protective of of his four year old sister, but my four year old daughter is insanely protective of her older brother and her little brother. It's, it's funny to watch. She gets on me, you know, if I if I'm teasing them too much.
Vance Crowe 1:53
I mean, kids are also that mirror back to yourself, right? You hear them do something that you you don't like, and then you're like, Well, you got that somewhere. You heard me say that? You heard your mother say that? Yeah, so good. Yeah.
Ryan Cooper 2:05
I've had a sister in law visiting us from Finland the past month, and it's funny, the things that like, they'll just be a different personality come out of my four year old daughter. You know, she's like, she's downloading different coding. Yeah,
Vance Crowe 2:20
I've always thought, going back to your home school thing, that the scariest thing in the world is when a culture turns the children on the parents. You read about the kids in China that were told like, oh, you should report on your parents if they're doing this thing. And it's like, you take this innocence of children and they look up to their teacher, and they like them. And the teacher says, you know, if you hear your family talking about these things, you should come and tell us, it's for the best. And like you, you pervert that. I think that is one of the darkest evils in the world, and it's like the thing that makes me the most weary of the public school system.
Ryan Cooper 3:00
Yeah, yeah, you should be weary, I imagine, with the public school system, I'm a, you know, I was a born and bred and raised radical against the state, so I won't have a whole lot of friendly things to say. But schools are a funny thing, you know, because they're, they're a golden cow in so many ways you can't touch them. Golden Calf, I think, is the thing. You can't touch them. There's so much energy from the state to create these very close bonds between people and their local schools, you know. And everybody feels like, you don't attack my school, you know, go, whatever my school mascot is, and you don't realize that, like, hey, this, this thing, this has a huge layer of bureaucracy on top of it. It's probably responsible for soaking up 75% of your tax money. And it, it is an arm. It is an arm of of the government. At some point it's a government school. You know, I know, I know it's really important to a lot of people, but, yeah, you should be, you should be very careful about what kids are getting taught in there. I think that that's my opinion.
Vance Crowe 4:17
I hadn't actually thought about the the mascot thing. It's funny. I have never been a person that's been like, rah, rah, the school team. I'm, like, very anti mob. I'm, like, extremely wary of getting into groups. But I'd never really thought about that aspect of it. But I think that's probably true, right? Like, Go Hornets. I'm a hornet through and through and like, yeah, it's all a part of making them malleable and a part of the group. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 4:45
it's the Black Knights in in our time Farmington, the go black knights. And it's like Black Knights have nothing to do with Southeast Missouri. Farmington, we're a mining. Slash farming town. The rebrand was at some point, somebody just picked up name, you know, and so the superintendent for Farmington, he smoked a 12 year old kid on his bike with his Jeep a couple years ago, like, two years ago, and it was incredible watching the community, like, rise up in defense of the superintendent. So he it was captured on like a ring camera. So he, like, hit this 12 year old boy on his bike out in front of the 12 year old boy's home. And the mom, the mom went to our local police chief Rick Baker and and actually, I don't think she went directly to the chief, she went to the police. She tried to file a report. The police told her that if they filed the report, she and her kid would be liable for the damage to the superintendent's car. And come to find out, the superintendent's kids are being babysat by the chiefs of police wife, you know. And, and you start to look at that whole thing and and and realize what all of that that, like education funding is really defending, you know, like superintendents have a huge amount of resources power and influence in our communities. You don't even think about it, you know, because, hey, go black knights,
Vance Crowe 6:20
yeah. And the idea of local control has just been ripped out, right? Like, when I see the, you know, all the doge stuff that's coming on, like, we're gonna, you know, get in there and take out parts of the government. Man, if they could just get rid of the Department of Education, I would be 100% behind that. Yeah. And I know there are good teachers out there, and there are people that are, like, really dedicated to the system, but like, nothing good has come from federal like imputing whatever is going on in their minds into the into the education system. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 6:56
if you're in a small rural town, you should go look at your school and then go look at the administrator building, you know? And it's like driving through a small rural town and looking at all of the dilapidated, falling apart buildings and sale barns and compared to, like, the beautiful, newly renovated banks and government buildings, you know? It's a It's weird, man. It's like, it's not right, it's not how it's supposed to be. You know, the bureaucrats really are in like, total control, wherever you look now, you know, I was working for GM, you start to feel that, even from G, you know, you work for like, a big corporation, I think you've worked for a corporation the past, and you start to realize, like, there's a lot of good people in this stack, this hierarchy stack, but at the end of the day, most people are just forwarding emails like, you're just, you're kind of getting the email from GM and, you know, distributing the talking points for this month. And, you know, people from a community need an expert in some, you know, in some specific way, whether it's to buy their car, to educate their kids or to medicate their cattle, they need that local expert. And a lot of the experts are just kind of doing their jobs, forwarding emails. You know,
Vance Crowe 8:17
the craziest thing about a corporation is, you know, we think of ourselves as being in this giant capitalist system, but inside of a corporation is really just communism. And so we have these like entities that move around and, you know, pretend to be large arms of capitalism, but many of them, the reason that they became the big one that they are is they figured out how to do to navigate the regulatory system, and then inside of their own company, there is not some free market of like, hey, whoever can deliver printing to me is the one we're going to use? It's like, Nope, this is the printing group. And everybody uses this printing company, you know, this printing organization. Same thing with the IT of our computers. Same thing with how are we doing sustainability? And I mean, they figured out something. You know, my business is completely hand crafted, right? Everything has to be done by either me or one of my four people working in the way that they're supposed to. So clearly, they've figured out a way to make that system work. But the craziest thing is that it's so communistic that it becomes this, like bizarro world, when you really look at it, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 9:30
there's a lot there. Dude, I getting people to work together is really difficult. It's really difficult. So for the past three, four years, I've been trying to organize and collaborate with as many local producers of real human food as possible and help them distribute and scale and it is really difficult to get people to like each other and. You know, it's a it's everybody has their own everybody has their own incentives. Everybody's following their own incentives. And so when you when you walk into, again, I'll keep reverting back to this example, because it's in my recent past. But when you walk into a car dealership, you know, you've got, you got all these people coming to work at the same time to open up this business. They have some type of fixed supply chain that's bringing them inventory there, and then turn selling it to the community. The community can't afford it because we're all too broke, and so they go and they gather a whole bunch of banks. You know, you might have 3040, banks under the roof of a car dealership, and they're, they're quoting rates on behalf of these banks structuring these loans and and getting these vehicles sold to these people, you know, but most likely, there's a whole bunch of personalities under that roof that don't like each other, that are pissed off about something that happened last week. And you do start to think like, Man, why do people come here every day? Why do people just continue? You know, some of them hate their jobs. You know, I talked to the salesman, or this, this office staff and, like, just hate their job. They just, you know, this is just the thing before they get to the next thing. But they'll be there for 510, years. You know, some of these people, they'll spend their whole life working in line with other people that they don't really enjoy for some goal, that they don't really understand, for money, that they're really giving half of to that shitty Bureau Croc bureaucracy we're just talking about. So it's like, why are they doing that, you know? And I think it's, well, you were talking about your daughter having some things built in her. You know, we want to work with people. We do want to work with people. And people want to have a purpose and drive that purpose. And good companies figure out how to get people to do that. What probably the biggest company in the history of of humankind, the United States government has figured out how to do that really well, and they've done it, I believe, with the money they've got, they've got this, this money system that is very manipulated, very controlled, very intentional. You know, it's not people don't think about money much. It just kind of, just kind of, there I need it. I need to buy groceries. I guess I can borrow it from the bank. If I'm buying a car or house, they don't really think about it. It's like a fish swimming in water. But when you start to meditate on that, that money as the mechanism to drive people's intentions every day, you start, you start to see why large organizations that are able to assemble like a large, centralized bucket of that currency. They can, they can dictate people's daily actions, even if it's in con, even if it's contrary to what they want to do that day. You know what I mean. And so on the flip side, I know this long winded but on the flip side, you've got guys who are kind of waking up and they're saying, Hey, I know a lot of guys like this waking up and saying, hey, I want to do something different with my life. I don't want to be part of this hierarchy stack and this bureaucracy, which clearly doesn't care about me. Just wants to make sure, you know, I got my booster shot this week, I'm gonna go do my own thing. But the only thing working against them is the money, you know. So you take a young guy who wants to go start a little farm, a little homestead, feed his family, wants to have a garden, he wants to, like, work a small enterprise, to, you know, to pay his taxes and to maybe save a little bit for the future, and it's nearly impossible now with our our money system. So you are right. You know, we pretend we're in this big capitalistic society. We're not in a capitalistic society. It's primarily some type of socialistic society. I think,
Vance Crowe 13:57
Okay, we're gonna get back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper from Bitcoin Ranch, in just a moment, he's going to talk about what he thinks of as civilizational collapse that we are in right now, and it is a fascinating conversation, but I want to take a few moments to talk about legacy interviews. Legacy interviews is where we sit down with your loved ones to talk about their life stories so that future generations can not only know the stories of their past, but can actually see and hear their loved ones the way that they really are. It is a challenge to get people to sit down and record their stories, particularly during the holidays. You think you're going to do it, maybe you're going to pull out your phone, but it just doesn't work out, and that's for a lot of reasons, a lot of which is that there's so many distractions. There's so many other things going on. So if you've thought about trying to capture the life stories of your loved ones, let us help you out. We will sit down either in our studio here in St Louis, Missouri, or we can do an. Online interview, and I will actually personally host the conversation. My role is not just to get them to tell stories, it's to get them to forget that there are lights and cameras in here and to relax so that we can capture them as they really are. We capture their genuine laughter, their thoughts about deep and meaningful moments in their lives and advice that may be hard for them to access unless they've had somebody really listening to them for quite a while. If you've been thinking about doing this, then I would encourage you go to legacyinterviews.com and sign up to have me give you a call and chat about the interview that we can do with your loved ones. We can do it either as an individual or as a couple, or we can give each of your parents a chance to tell their own life stories and then come together in an interview with them together. This is a really beautiful and profound gift, and if you've been thinking about doing it. The holidays are a great time to make that happen. So go to legacyinterviews.com and fill out the form for us to have a chat. All right, let's get back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper. I think we're gonna look back on it and call it a bureaucratic society. I think that that's something that's never been talked about in school. You don't learn about it as like, oh, there's communism and socialism, and those are kind of hard to distinguish between. And then you have, you know, capitalism and democracy, and these are all just kind of overlapping. But the thing that we're in right now is bureaucracy, where it is like, there is a system that is created, and that system serves itself, and whatever it produces is exactly what it was meant to produce. And we bizarrely live in this world where we look at what it produces and we think, no, no, that's not what it was supposed to do. It's just that something got messed up. And the reason that, you know our taxes are out of control, or our school system is set up in this way is because it accidentally got messed up. But the reality is, no, it is actually doing exactly what it was designed to do. And
Ryan Cooper 17:06
well, and well, it's like the largest organization in the history of Earth right now. You know?
Vance Crowe 17:12
Yeah, that's right, yeah. Do you feel like it will continue? Well,
Ryan Cooper 17:16
I think, I think, I think organizations grow to a certain point and and then they they confront like a wall of nature, which, which, you know, a tree can only grow so big. The only way it can grow anymore is to spread some of its genetic energy and grow besides its point, you know, but besides itself, so not in the centralized way. I don't think it can. I think, I don't think it is. I mean, I think, I think we're, we're watching the collapse right now. I think, I think we're kind of in it
Vance Crowe 17:51
collapse, you'd use that word, collapse is a scary word, right? That collapse is where you're like, whatever comes up after the dust is settled. You know, we don't really know, but it may not be good, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 18:05
no, it's certainly true. But the collect, you know, we might, we might be in 100 year collapse. You know, we might be in 100 year and that's what I think we probably are. I think we're at the end of the collapse, whatever the nation state, bureaucratic state has been, you know, we were under an, it seemed, infinite amount of control and power from the church, you know, the Catholic Church, for a period of time, and that that gave way to, you know, a nation state type system. And I think we're going through some type of fourth turning event right now. Yeah,
Vance Crowe 18:44
yeah. I look at the way that governments think the world is going to work like I see the this morning. I just briefly saw it that we were sending F 35 over to the Ukraine, and now we're going to send these, you know, what are supposed to be the amazing warfare fighters. But then I at the same time, I see these fleets of drones, and I think, like that is the future. Have you seen this, where they're like in giant rows, and they, you know, like that, to me, is one certainly going to be able to outpace whatever the F 35 can do. And two is absolutely and utterly terrifying, because you don't need a giant manufacturing company like a Boeing or a Lockheed to make that. You get enough guys in a small area that can produce little motors and software, and you can now create a new kind of army that can that, that we don't have a way to stop it.
Ryan Cooper 19:39
Yeah, I think as decentralized as power projection can become, I think it will. And what I mean by that is building a big army was really effective at a certain time. Now it's just a huge target, you know, now what you want is like three really smart. In a basement with laptops, you know, and some of those drones that you're talking about. And so as all of these technologies get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, because and closer to closer to us, really, you know, as the internet has, you know, the Internet was giant computers at a couple universities, they kept getting cheaper and cheaper. You know, compute power got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and now we all have a super computer in our pocket. I think that will happen with almost every type of technology. It'll be very difficult to keep any of it under some type of centralized control. I think, I think that's what's happening. It
Vance Crowe 20:41
for a long time, it looked like that was not the case, right until Elon Musk bought X. It looked like all of these social media platforms were being ultimately used against us, right in this like panopticon, where you didn't realize you were within a system, like when COVID happened, my podcast, growing, growing, growing, growing, and then I had a guy on it was the height of my podcast was where he was talking about how he knew for certain that there were people that had COVID that didn't have symptoms. And he was like, just because you get COVID doesn't mean you're gonna die, right? And he knew about this before, and then you can go look at my statistics, right? All of a sudden, YouTube just plummets all the way down, and there was never any recovery after that, right? It was like there was definitely being held down in some way. And I was always embarrassed to say this, because I mentioned it to my wife where I was like, This is so bizarre, but I don't want to be the guy that's like, people aren't listening to me because I'm being censored well, and now, you know, you fast forward, you know, three or four years, you're like, Oh no, they were absolutely doing that. There's like, clearly the government was involved in it. The companies themselves were doing it. And until Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into x, it was, it looked like it was all heading towards centralization, and there's no way out of this. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 22:04
but Elon bought X, you know, I think that's the point. Like, all it takes is one hole in the bucket. You can put a lot of power, a lot of control, a lot of authority in there, but at some point, you know, somebody's gonna poke a hole in the bucket, and I don't think they can put the genie back in the bottle. Now, you know, I mean, x, can you imagine if we didn't have x? Right now, we wouldn't be talking about those 35 getting shipped to Ukraine. They'd be there already for one you know that that was shocking. It's hard to ignore them having like FBI office space in meta headquarters. What?
Vance Crowe 22:43
Yeah, and those fucking losers that were actually being like, here, let me get you an office and whatever. And you can hear, you hear Zuckerberg and these guys be like, well, I they were gonna take away my company, or they were gonna, you know, they put pressure on me, but somebody had to come along and poke a hole in it. And Elon did, like, no matter what, he took the biggest gamble in our lifetime, I think, of any single human being. Because if Kamala Harris would have won, who knows what would have happened to Elon Musk, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 23:15
well, we're not out of the woods yet, you know? I mean, what's the date today? We're recording this podcast, you know, it's, it's gonna be, I expect it'll be an interesting next 60 days. How long do we got until January, 20.
Vance Crowe 23:29
You think assassinations?
Ryan Cooper 23:30
I mean, there we've had two of them. You know, isn't it so crazy to say, so
Vance Crowe 23:37
weird, like, and like, as soon as I say that, I guarantee there was somebody listening and being like, oh, man, Vance has jumped the shark. You're talking about assassinations? Like, yeah. Well, not only did they happen, they also got memory hold. And nobody talks about them, and we don't think about it, but like, absolutely could have happened. And like, throughout history, this is the way of things, right? When power starts getting threatened, they do kill people at the top? Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 24:02
yeah, people. There's like, real consequences to this game. Now, you know, so I'll use that to go back to our farming, because I had some questions for you. I have ended up in this, like, very deep rabbit hole of, you know, sovereign farming, regenerative agriculture, small communities, hyper localism. Let's produce food locally and distribute it. And it is. It's really hard. It's like what we were just talking about. It would be awesome if I had some you know, company, some Tyson, you know, to kind of come in and just kind of map the logistics and handle the pickup and the delivery and but then you see what that does to one the end consumer. I think there's a lot of highlight on that right now. You know, we got RFK out there talking about, you know, maybe they're being a little too much for. Die in our cereal. I guess my wife wouldn't let me feed our kids cereal, so I don't know, but I there's that side where the consumers don't seem to be getting what they are wanting, or maybe they're getting what they're wanting, but they're too stupid and uneducated. And I don't mean that that Americans in general are stupid uneducated. I think we're being kept stupid, and we're not being educated about how important food is. I think that's my opinion. And then on the other side, it's just destroying, like the low the American farmer, you know, I we help a dairy farmer who switched to being a, like a fresh dairy, raw dairy, in 2021 because they hadn't, they hadn't had, like, a price hike on their their milk by the 100 pound in 20 or 30 years, you know, and so, so this, this, this large collective that we're talking about, this centralized pot of money that's, you Know, managed and controlled and able to hire truck drivers and put together distribution to another state. That Collective is crushing the American farmer. It seems it's also not bringing food to market at least as much as people think it is. If we talk to a typical farmer, they're like, you know, we feed the world. It's like, No, you grow ethanol, you know? So I I'm sorry, I have, have ended up around a whole bunch of conspiratorial, ag related people who are trying to blaze a different way and having a really hard time at it. You know, farmers markets like, look great on Instagram, but it's really hard to build. You know, a three family supporting business on a farmers market. So then I heard you on barn talk and you, you seem to have a really balanced view of what centralized companies like Monsanto have done to help local farmers and American farmers develop a product, take a product to market, be Part of that that. Call it the food stack. How do you, how do you parse like the the the downsides with the upsides. Do you think that they're, they're fixable? Do you think, do you think that the solution is to to, to have large megalithic corporations kind of organize all this, but maybe under a better incentive structure. What's your thoughts there? And was that cohesive? Do
Vance Crowe 27:50
you understand? I mean, so I don't think the future that we want to live in is one that is responding to the incentives that are there. And so the biggest incentives right now, as far as I'm concerned, and I talked about this on X over the weekend, and some people will cheer you on, and some people will be like, What are you doing? Like, I thought you were on our team. The first one is the ethanol mandates in the United States are the most absurd thing on the face in the United States, because what they are is, like in certain states, they'll say, you have to blend this much ethanol into your gasoline, and that's the only thing you're allowed to sell your you gas station are not allowed to sell something, you know, your your petroleum based product, without us adding some corn into it, and that takes up 40% of the Corn. Well, there's no difference between doing that and just walking up to every single American that travels on any form of transportation that, I guess, that uses gasoline, and saying, like, Here, give me, give me a little bit of your money. I'm gonna just take a little bit of that money, right? It's insane. Well, I'm gonna give me
Ryan Cooper 28:57
a little bit of that money. I take a little bit of that money, and then I'm going to use that pot of money to go out and control American farmers, or at least, kind of dictate market conditions in some degree, right? Yeah,
Vance Crowe 29:09
I mean, to make it so the market situation is so distorted that it's very, very difficult for somebody say, you know, I'm going to bring in a different kind of corn. I'm going to bring in, I'm going to bring in a different product that I want to bring to market, because there's so much momentum going towards elevators and the logistics systems and everything that makes that ethanol work, and the feed stocks for, you know, feeding cattle that that whole system. So if somebody says, Hey, I believe that we could do a new thing with okra, or we could do a new, new thing with pick your whatever vegetable. That system just isn't there, because all of the money, all of the safety, is going that way. And then the second, the other big one is subsidized crop insurance, which is bat shit insane. It is like, hey, if. You can get several years of your crop up to whatever you know, this median production. So you do five years, then we know, on average, your farm produces this many acres. If you ever produce less than that, then we will write you a check, and you'll get that money right. And this makes it so the it would be fine if that were a private insurance system, but the fact that it is subsidized by the federal government means that you're not actually insuring at the rate of which people take collections off of it. You've distorted that market, and so now all of the bigger players can never lose as long as you keep doing your corn and soybeans you are never, ever going to lose, and you have that land, and as long as you can just keep making those payments, then everything's fine. So without removing those two things, and probably the CRP system as well, that that one's more technically complicated, no, we will not break free from the system that we have, and I don't think it will be possible to make a healthier food system. And like, I don't think farmers are setting out to not produce the food that they want. But I told you, I was at this park the other day with my daughters. Literally every single person at that park was obese. Literally every single one that was like 35 people, yeah, something is horribly, horribly wrong. And it's not that people are lazy or bad. It's that the food that is available to them, in the quantities and the flavors and the whatever, is clearly wrong, which is why I went from being like, RFK is a dangerous quack. He says all kinds of crazy things to me being like, you know what, I'm willing to try something new. Like, I'm definitely, you know, like, I think we should build up another system and jump over to it rather than tear it all down. But something needs to change, because, you know, people that I'm even close to, people that I know love their kids and are trying to feed them well, have obese kids, and it's, it's, there's something really deeply sad and wrong about that, yeah,
Ryan Cooper 32:04
yeah, there's a lot of people don't even know how, you know, a lot of people don't know how to, how to feed their kids healthy. I mean, they, they've legitimately been lied to, I think, by this food pyramid for a long, long time. You know,
Vance Crowe 32:21
it's very sad. Well, you got into farming and then named your ranch in your Bitcoin Ranch, yeah. What's that all about? Yeah?
Ryan Cooper 32:28
Well, we, we keep all of our excess funds in Bitcoin. I'm, I've, like, opted out of the American dollar. So you asked a little bit ago, you call this a collapse, you know, it's kind of scary. I do think it's a collapse. I think it's a monetary collapse, and I think it's going as slowly as possible, which, which is probably a good thing for us. I think we saw a big part of it in 2008 and then we've seen, like, glimpses of it ever since then, as we kind of push the envelope off. But you know, if, if our I spent a lot of time sitting around thinking about money when I was a sales and finance manager, you know, it's just like all of your daily goals, everything that you do, is denominated by some type of, you know, some type of money, salesman's pay or dealership compensation. And you really kind of get this behind the scenes view of what money is at a at a corporate level. And if I spent some time thinking about this, if I if my great, great grandfather had worked really hard in his young years, you know the there's a proverb that says you should, you should, like, carry heavy weights when you're young. You know you should work hard when you're young, while you have youth. And if he had worked extra hard and sacrificed time away from his family when he was in his early 20s, and he he saved a little bit of that money, and he wanted to pass it on to me as an inheritance. If he thought about me his great, great grandkid, and he saved that money in the past 100 years, if he saved that money in US dollars, he probably was able to save, like a couple bucks back then and transport that to me, and now I could buy, like a Snickers bar, like maybe, you know, we the thes 99% of its value. It's actually 99.9% of its value over the past 100 years. And none of us really think about that. We just kind of operate as if, you know, 2% inflation, 2% of our money is buying power kind of getting slipped away every year. Is is nominal. You know, none of us should be worried about it, but 99% of my great, great grandpa's wealth that he was able to store up has been stolen from him by now. So, so we're in some form of collapse. You. And it's exhilarating now. I mean, we can, if you buy eggs, you know, since 2019 you'd know, you know, if you buy, if you buy collectible baseball cards or land or gold or anything of real value, that's not easy to produce with ever evolving technology, then you realize, like, wow, my money, it's it's not, it's not worth it's worth less. Worth less means it's worth less constantly, like, year to year now, month to month. And because of that, it's a terrible way to save. It's a horrible way to save. But we're all lied to, like with the food pyramid, and we're told, Hey, if you got some extra money when you're a young, young person, take it down to your bank, stick it in, you know, a CD or a Roth IRA, and we're gonna, you know, loan it out to somebody else. And you don't really understand what's going on. You just get told, Well, this is how you build wealth over time, but it's not working man. I mean, it's broken. And I talked to a lot of people about this, if people don't see that it's broken, then they they just can't, they can't see that it's broken, but it's it's destroying most working Americans, people on fixed incomes are suffering right now. Our homelessness is skyrocketing. I mean, people are literally starting because of this problem. And I think the only way out now is for us to find a new money and that's not as radical of a thing to say as it probably strikes a lot of us when we first hear it, because we as humans, we've been choosing new money over and over again every time the money was manipulated and used against us throughout time. You know, every couple 100 years, it seems, throughout history, the money was taken control of by some centralized authority, and then it was manipulated and used to steal against the people. And eventually people realize, like, oh my gosh, this money is just not worth anything anymore. And they go out and they find a new money. So that's what, that's what, that's what I did, and we, as a business, as a farm, we keep all of our, all of our, all of our funds in Bitcoin, anything that we're not going to operate with, like month to month, first
Vance Crowe 37:33
thing somebody is going to bring up with you is the volatility of it. I mean, right now you got to be feeling that volatility go up, up, up, up, but, but, like, there's other times, you know, when it drops from 60 down to 20 now, all of a sudden, you've lost two thirds of the buying power of that. How has your business been able to handle that volatility? Well, like
Ryan Cooper 37:52
I said, we keep our operating funds in the local currency right now, it's the US dollar.
Vance Crowe 37:58
I like that in
Ryan Cooper 37:59
the local currency. Yeah, rural Americans love the United States dollar issued by the Federal Reserve. But anything, anything beyond that, we we save in Bitcoin, and then we also, we offer, we offer 5% discounts if anybody pays in Bitcoin, to try to encourage local usage of Bitcoin in our area, and some people like that. Some people have no idea what we're talking about. But then that Bitcoin, you know, kind of goes into our Bitcoin reserves. It gets put in cold storage, and it's, it's, its intention is to be left there for for 100 years as Bitcoin Ranch, our ranching endeavor grows. So it's a real long term play. The frequency of the up and down doesn't matter so much to us. We've been doing this for three years, and our Bitcoin Treasury is up 100%
Vance Crowe 38:52
Yeah, I'm the same way. So I offer a 15% discount on legacy interviews if you'll pay in Bitcoin. So cool. And then what I do is, like, if you pay into that, then I just don't touch it. I don't pay any money out of it. Like, I'll just, like, basically, it's like, we're doing that for free. And so so far, that's been by far the best investment I've made. Like, the money that I've made in that account is just killing it. And even if it doesn't over the short to medium term, it has no bearing on my business. It's, it's like, it's been very, very effective.
Ryan Cooper 39:25
Yeah, it's, it's kind of a fun experiment to do it that way. In my experience, when you, when you take money, you think, Oh, I'm gonna go buy bitcoin with this. It usually doesn't happen. Something comes up and you end up needing that cash or something, at least at the point in the business we're at, you know, which is, you know, like that three year struggle, Mark, you know, just, just forced entrepreneurial spirit keeping things alive. So
Vance Crowe 39:51
when we do the amazing, have you found people willing to pay you in Bitcoin? Man,
Ryan Cooper 39:55
it's shocking. It's shocking where we find Bitcoiners, really. Then I've sold hay for Bitcoin. We sell milk for Bitcoin every week. Whole bunch, whole bunch of Bitcoiners buy their, their fresh milk and Bitcoin beef eggs. You know, I don't know if we've done any, how many projects, a dozen eggs? Dude, I don't even know. I don't handle it. I don't, I, I'm, I'm, like the boots on the ground. Guy, so I have a business partner, Scott. Scott is incredible. I think you may have got an opportunity to meet Scott at some point, but Scott's retired Chief Technical Officer of a financial institution here in St Louis. He's way over qualified to be helping me build a pharmacist company and a ranch, but he is man, and so he handles, he handles all of our, all of our, our payments and things like that, and a lot of our deliveries.
Vance Crowe 40:52
When I think about the SATs, that's the the thing that brings, I think, makes people feel more comfortable with Bitcoin, because I've just realized this, like at $100,000 which were right at that line. It's almost 100k It's like $1 will buy you 1000 sets. Yeah. And what's crazy to think about is someday we may be at one set equals $1 parody. And so this like buying 1000 SATs for $1 feels like a hell of a deal, right? Because I think a lot of times people think like, I don't have $100,000 to buy a Bitcoin, and that's the only unit of measurement that they know about. But when you start being like, oh, every dollar I put in, I get 1000 Satoshis, like that, all of a sudden starts feeling a lot better, and you don't have to be worried, like, do I have one whole Bitcoin, right?
Ryan Cooper 41:45
Yeah, yeah, the one whole Bitcoin thing, it is, it is kind of a hump for people to get past. When I first introduced to Bitcoin, and it's 2024 I still bump into people all the time who have never heard a Bitcoin. No idea. I'm just clueless. You know, I was talking to fire a couple weeks ago, and, you know, stopped in his tractor, and he said something. I said, Well, you know, you can always pay him Bitcoin. He said, What's Bitcoin? Orange pill on this dude inside of a John Deere tractor. But, you know, I I also don't think people are ready for Bitcoin, if they're not ready for Bitcoin, you know? I mean, unless you realize you
Vance Crowe 42:26
have to stripped away. I heard sailors say the Michael Saylor say this the other day, and I was like, You know what? That's actually totally right. You have to perceive that something is wrong with the US dollar for you to be able to even be open to the idea of Bitcoin. And that was one of those, like, necessary but not sufficient conditions that I just didn't understand. It's like, if you think the US dollar is like, hey, it's doing, look, it's the strongest in the world, and everything's good. And look how successful I have been with it, or my family has been with it. Then, then you don't see it. It isn't until you start being like, hey, it used to be that if I had $250,000 in the bank, like, that was a lot of money. I was gonna be able to buy a house with that, or I was gonna be able to pass that on to my kids. And now, all of a sudden, $250,000 doesn't seem like that much money. Then all of a sudden you're like, Well, wait, why? Why is that not very much money? And what's going on there. And once you start asking yourself, what went wrong with the money? Or then you're more open to finding some different system. But you have to first perceive, and I remember when when Rob and I you met Rob, good friend of mine, when we were first talking about Bitcoin, more than 10 years ago, we would go to places, and we would only use inflation when talking about places like Venezuela, because people just like they couldn't comprehend that the American inflation that at the time we were being told was two and a half percent, it was probably closer to four or 5% but they would be like, No, I'm told that we have to have inflation. If we don't, then, you know, then things will just keep getting cheaper, and that that wouldn't work. We need things to get more expensive over time, which is like this totally backwards, bizarre thing. And it's only now that people have watched inflation skyrocket, but still have this insane belief that it's ever going to stop, yeah, right, like that. We're ever really going to get it down to 2% that the Fed can somehow get into the into the driver's seat and be able to control it. There's it's not stopping. It's going to continue accelerating. Yeah, it's
Ryan Cooper 44:26
going to continue to accelerate. And so if people didn't perceive a problem, you know, in 2020 maybe they're perceiving a problem. Now, if they don't perceive the problem now, I bet you they're going to perceive it in four years. You know, I was talking to a construction friend of mine, and again, we're in like, small, rural America, he told me. He said people used to come to me with $400,000 and want to build their dream house. He's now, now I'm not sure I can get started. Whoa, you know that's crazy, man. It's crazy so it affects. It affects everything, especially affects the farms, you know. And you you see, you see farms get sold and broken up, and, you know, farmers don't, don't want to see their farm broken up and developed, you know. But when they pass away, what are their kids supposed to do? This is a failed business. This thing does not produce anything. It is a, you know, we watched it suck the life out of our death, you know, for the end of his life, and and, and none of us really want to take time from our town jobs to come out and feed cattle. So especially if we're not paying to do it, we're not going to do it as a hobby. And so I guess that'll just get worse and worse and worse, unless, unless people start to change to a different money, you know, and and, you know, there's always the conversation about gold. People say, like, oh, you know, I can, you know, we can, we can use gold. But the truth is, in my opinion, we've moved to a digital age. We are in a digital age, you know, I don't even know how I'm supposed to take gold in exchange for some eggs or milk? You know? I mean, I, I don't know. Like, am I supposed to weigh it? You know? Like, none of that really makes sense, but I, we take, we accept SATs all the time.
Vance Crowe 46:14
Okay, if you are still here, that means you both know about legacy interviews, and you've heard me talk about Bitcoin, and if you're a bitcoiner, then let me offer you something that's going to be really easy for you. And if you've never used Bitcoin before, I'd like to use this as a way to both help you take one small step into Bitcoin, but also to get this incredibly valuable gift of a legacy interview for your loved ones. If you have been thinking about doing this, and you'd like to save 15% which is the most discount we ever give. And that's because I want to make this step easy. You can go to legacy interviews.com/bitcoin and there you will see a form that you can fill out that will let us know that you want us to have a conversation about your loved ones and the legacy interviews that you're thinking about, but also to receive a 15% discount if you will pay in Bitcoin. If you've been thinking about doing this for a long time, you've been wondering, Hey, how could I make this legacy interview happen? Even if you're not interested in Bitcoin at all, this is a great way to save a little bit of money and to dip your toe in just a little bit. All right, let's head back to the conversation with Ryan Cooper. The challenge of people getting online with Bitcoin seems insurmountable until you start talking about farms and people involved in agriculture, because there are so many people now that can look at that farm and say, Well, if I take over mom and dad's farm, the utility value, the amount of money that we're making by working this land is nowhere close to what that land is valued at, right? What you could go out and get paid for. And for so long, people would look at that and say, Oh, you sold mom and dad or grandma and granddad's farm. Like, how could you that's the family heritage? Well, if you look at it, you're making a rational decision. Like, it's completely rational decision. But this is not better for agriculture, that we keep having to sell off land, that the value of that the price of that land, is so far above the utility value, is not good for anyone and and what I say, I see this all the time. I said it to a group of Farm Credit bankers like there will come a day when, as Bitcoin becomes more and more ubiquitous, all of a sudden, these hedge funds and these family wealth offices and these groups that are spending all this money to pump it into land. They're gonna realize, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I can get the Val The reason they're putting it into land is because it's scarce. And because it's scarce, they know you can inflate it away. The value as the value of the dollars go down, the price of that land goes up, and so they stay at parity. But if they once, they realize, wait a second, I don't actually have to own that land and pay property tax on it and pay some farmer to be on there and worry about the liability. I can just put that in Bitcoin. Well, then suddenly we may watch the price of land plummet. Now, there's all these people be like, No, I don't want that, right? That'd be terrible. But the closer we can get land prices to the utility value, the more likely we are to have people that can diversify and make choices and get away from this insurance system and the ethanol system and produce all sorts of rich and interesting and diverse crops. But none of that happens until we get off of the dollar standard and move towards the Bitcoin standard.
Ryan Cooper 49:38
Yeah. Man, we went we went down the rabbit hole really fast here, if you do have listeners who are Bitcoiners, but it's a really hopeful future what you just described, and that's the collapse I think we're in, by the way. You know, the dollar system sucks. I mean, it sucks for almost everybody, except the unproductive the. A there's like, there's like, this class of unproductive bureaucrats in our society. And, you know, I could start naming the occupations, but I don't want to piss any of my friends off. There's, there's, like, this whole layer of paperwork doers and lawyers. I'll name some of you and and in, you know, whole industries built around not really producing anything. They help organize something, or help plan something, or help you navigate the absurd tax code, or whatever, whatever that may be. And I think, I think a lot of those jobs are probably going to be replaced by AI here real soon. And being a productive member of society, somebody who's who's like putting bricks on top of bricks, or or building a house, or installing the plumbing. I think those, those places in our our collective, are gonna be valued way higher in in what I think that does is, I think it turns us into a society of builders again, and not a society of investors. You know, because right now, like, you go out and you work real hard, you make some money, and then you realize, like, oh, the hardest part of this is actually keeping the money, like it's keeping the purchasing power of this money. And that's all too complicated for you. So you kind of, you hire this, like, thick layer of bureaucrats to you got your financial advisor to invest your money. You got insurance agent to buy your insurance. You got all of these, like, jobs while you go out and you try to do the layman's job and stack bricks on top of bricks. But that system is crushing the current American worker. Like, right now, you know, I mean, so like, right now, if you're a Wall Street banker, you've probably done a lot better over the past four years than if you you know you're, like, doing plumbing in st St Louis. Does that make sense?
Vance Crowe 52:12
Yeah. I mean, I think plumbers are doing pretty well, but I take your point on the like, if you were trying to be a server or a waiter or whatever, like, no, that's kept up.
Ryan Cooper 52:21
Part of the reason plumbers are doing real well right now is because we're actually, we're working our way through the collapse like right now, sir, people who can actually do things are being valued higher and higher in our economy as more and more of the like spreadsheet jobs go away. But what I think, what I think will be the real driver is, like you said, as as a lot of the things that have been valued before, like houses, like the idea that, you know, young guys, young girls should go out, work hard, save up, buy a house, and that's going to be like, your that's going to be your wealth storage for a long time, like, that's probably going to be over. You're not going to use land or homes as stores of wealth. They're going to become utility. There's gonna be a utility cost, magnificent.
Vance Crowe 53:06
I mean, like, think about the houses we could live in and the and they like, the the beauty that you could put into things. Like, people wonder, like, how is it that, if we're in this wonderful technological era, all of our buildings suck, right? Like they we build them for as cheap as possible. You look at a church now, right? Like a church goes to get built, and they build it out of Morton building material. It's a pole barn, yeah, it's and it's like, there's nothing lasting about it. It's nothing. And the reason they're doing that is because the value of the dollars are so quickly falling out, out of the bottom. Yeah, the end and so without when you think about the possibility of moving to a money system where the amount of money, this is the most beautiful and single beginning stage of understanding bitcoin is, there will only ever be 21 million. That's it. There's only 21 million Bitcoin. Now you can divide those into all these Satoshis, which is, you know, we can all have access to this money, but you can't make more of it. And you were talking about gold earlier. I read over the weekend, China found some enormous gold reserves, and it's like two and a half percent of the overall supply they just have now added into the gold market. Well, that is going to plummet the price. And as the price of gold goes up, people can just go mine more gold, right? You're like, oh, okay, now we can pay those steam shovels to go out there and go get more gold. It does not matter with Bitcoin, how high that price goes. There cannot be more of them and and so this is, like, something that is truly unique and beautiful. And I was in a little bit of a back and forth with my brother over the weekend, and I was saying, like, the beauty of Bitcoin is its scarcity. And he's like, Well, I don't understand why scarcity is valuable. And I'm like, well, name one thing that is, um. I'm rare, that is not valuable, right? Like, you could say, well, my children's painting, right? Okay, that's fine. But, like, but like, you know, the reason sand is not valuable is because it's not rare. The reason that it depends if water is scarce and you need it, then it's very, very valuable. If it's not scarce, then it isn't but with Bitcoin, the scarcity is implicit in the system, and as more and more people begin to see its value, as the demand goes up, but you can't increase the supply, the value is going to go up. Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 55:33
and hopefully that will, that will drive, like a devaluation of a lot of things in the world. That's what I'm really trying to say, whether it's land or houses or degrees, that the the the amount, the reason all of our churches suck right now is because everything's being stolen from us. I really believe that all of the productivity that has happened over the past decades, you know, of technological advancement, all of that wealth has been stolen from us and turned into battleships or, or paid, you know, a whole bunch of federal turbines, wind turbines, you know, or or ethanol production, you just gets lost in this, like massive things. And we keep getting poorer and poorer and poorer, so much so that we can't even afford our grandparents farms anymore, and that's the truth of it. We can't afford our grandparents farms anymore, and they've made all of these. They've made all they've taken all of that wealth and used it to subsidize a whole bunch of jobs that don't actually produce anything. Which means that if I just want to be a farmer like I can't, I can't get going fast enough to keep up with just the ever running away costs as all this like investment money comes in and invests in the farms and the equipment, the Ag culture and the infrastructure and the elevators, you know what I mean. And so if we had a way to, yeah, store up if our money, you know, was the S, p5, 100, you know, and it wasn't, it wasn't losing this 10% every year, then I might be able to store it in that and go and trade that one day for for land anyways.
Vance Crowe 57:16
Well, and I resent it so deeply that you like when it used to be when we were kids, you'd be like, All right, we're gonna go open a savings account. Now it wasn't actually at all that good of a financial decision to go, you know, open a savings account, because you weren't going to get an interest rate that was as high as inflation. But now you make money, you've got to go invested into the stock market, because if you don't, then that money is just going to be burned through. Why don't people look around and be like, Hey, man, fuck you. Why do I have to do this? Like, I don't want to have to invest in these companies. And the insane thing about the stock market is we set it up so that a certain percentage of your paycheck gets pulled out of it, and then we drop it in, usually in index funds, right where then people are like, Oh, the way that I get listed on this index fund is I follow these sustainability metrics, these dei metrics. I do whatever I've got to do, so that every week, on Friday afternoon, at two o'clock, we get just a showered with money, which continues to make our valuations go up. But these companies are not they're not honed to make money. They're honed to pull in investments, as opposed to selling something that's valuable.
Ryan Cooper 58:28
Yeah, they're not honed to be productive. They're not they're not honed to build things. They're honed to invest in this very manipulated, strange market that's laid out in front of them. You
Vance Crowe 58:39
know, when you think about this collapse, what is your time frame? Do you think? You know, how does Bitcoin do over time?
Ryan Cooper 58:48
Well, I think the US dollar is probably going to lose about 10% a year for the foreseeable future. And I mean that like if you're not trying to buy rice krispies, and you're trying to buy, you know, a bar of gold or a collectible baseball card or an acre of land. Yeah, I think we're, I think we're probably, you're probably gonna see like, a 10% loss in purchasing power per year for a while. I think, you know Michael Saylor, you know, he's modeled this out pretty well. You know, he models Bitcoin at, I think, $13 million by 2040 and I don't know what portion of that is the collapse the US dollar, and what portion of that is, you know, the absolute scarcity of there being 21 million Bitcoin ever anymore. But what it does for me is it gives me a money I can save in and I can I can be an entrepreneur. I can work hard, and whatever little bit that I can save up, I can store it in this new economy, and it will be there, I believe, to catch my family and my community and my. Farm, while the old, the old one collapsed a little bit, you know, people are going to pay more and more for fertilizer. We're not even in a hot war yet, but we'll see by tomorrow. You know, things, the inputs on farming are going to go up, up, up, up. And I'm, I'm not sure where the other side of the equation is going to come in from, unless, unless farmers, you know, take an ego check, you know, think, hey, maybe, maybe our Grandpas were bamboozled a little bit by, you know, a converted federal government that pivoted from, you know, winning World War Two to, you know, farming and running the USDA back here. Maybe we were fed a load of garbage on some points. They definitely lied about the food pyramid. They seem to have not been completely honest about the money. You know, let's, uh, let's look at some of these things with fresh eyes. Man, that's kind of what I try to push all of our local farmers to do.
Vance Crowe 1:00:59
What do you think this new administration is going to do regarding the economy? Yeah,
Ryan Cooper 1:01:04
I I have big hopes. I have big hopes. I don't think any of this stuff is going to get fixed from the top down Vance. I don't I think, I think, I think we're going to have to fix it from the ground up. I think, you know, families will have to fix it for the family. Communities will have to fix it for their community. I think we haven't gotten into local politics at all. But you know, I've spent the past probably three, four years going to a lot of my local politic meetings and trying to get to know as many of as many of my local governance as possible, my local share, my county commissioners, my mayor and and they're not thinking about this stuff, man. I mean, the the emails that their corporation is sending them is like, hey, you know, just make sure the roads get taken care of. And here's some federal grants you can apply for. And nobody's thinking like, hey, you know, where's the electricity come from? If, if, if there's a statewide electrical issue, you know, a problem getting utilities turned on. Who do we call? Who do we, who do we handle for that? Those aren't, those aren't the problems that they think they're even supposed to fix, you know? So a lot of times it's not. It's not that there's like, bad people making a lot of these decisions. They just, they don't, they don't even realize that there's that there's the authority for them to take up, to challenge the problem. You know what? I mean, the they're kind of having their problems dictated to him and and so I'm hoping that this, this, this new administration fixes a lot, but we're in a lot of trouble. Regardless, there's no, there's no undoing 10% purchasing power lost a year because of, you know what, 40% of the currency being printed in the past four years. Yeah.
Vance Crowe 1:03:00
And the best example is, if your city is making its income from property tax, right, you can just continue to ratchet up how valuable those houses are, but nothing says that people can continue to pay that No. And so then they can't pay their property taxes, so then they have to pack up and leave.
Ryan Cooper 1:03:17
And no, they're not pack up and leave. Then you as a city have to go in and remove your park benches so that those people don't sleep in the park. There you go. Yeah, that's really what's happening. That's right, you know these local communities, if you think of your town or your county as a as a community, and you realize what the leaders of community, the problems that they're working on are like bike paths and the new grant for the fire station not how can we maintain the infrastructure that we paid for with federal grant money that's now falling apart? If the federal money isn't there to replace it or repair it, it's going to crumble. And that's really what you're happening seeing happen across rural America. So, I mean, if RFK comes in, I hope he does what you just said, hopefully listens to your podcast, and and, and it starts to bring, bring land down to the cost of of of its usage. But, you know, at the end of the day, if, if rural America, I live in a, you know, 87,000 population County. Most of the people in my county barely know how to farm. Don't know how to cook, you know, don't know how to educate their families. Don't know how to communicate with each other without, you know, Facebook, text messaging, most of them, you know, most of them, are going to have a real hard time. And it's kind of, it's, there's this, you know, you hear like the man, if the world goes to hell, I'm gonna go hunting, you know. Or, you know, we got cows out in the field. People have no idea how far they are away from food by having cows out in the field, you know. I mean, you know, do you have. Local packing plants, you know, do we? We actually opened up a local packing plant in Farmington, and it was like an ant. It was a literal answer to prayer, because we all realize, hey, we have these local farms. If we got to ship our cattle and we, you know, and diesel goes to $8 a gallon, you know, what are we going to do?
Vance Crowe 1:05:17
Oh, man, that's, uh, another big thing. So on x this weekend, I mentioned the the different things. I thought, you know, getting rid of ethanol mandates. CRP, gotta go crop insurance. But the, the biggest one, the one that would make us healthiest, the fastest, is just get rid of all USDA inspection. Just, there's none of that. Yeah, and that way, if you decide that you're going to slaughter a cow and you want to sell that to somebody that's over on the other side of the Mississippi River, fine, yeah, there's like, that's okay. That's between you and that other person. But the USDA getting in there, and they're, you know, giving their special blessing as they stand beside it, like the people that believe that the USDA is making our food any healthier are delusional. They are putting in so many rules so that you're sitting there, just like people are focused on the bike paths instead of like, how are we gonna have water mains that don't have lead in them? Yeah, it's the exact same thing with the USDA. It's like, how are you gonna fill out this form, and do you have that RFID tag, as opposed to like, Hey, can we have as decentralized of processing as possible so that small farms can take their animals in, get them butchered and sell the meat locally? You
Ryan Cooper 1:06:29
hear about this battery plant that caught fire down in Fredericktown, Missouri, lithium, oh, yeah, vaguely, yeah. That's like in my backyard and, and it's, it's a great example of what local government does when under pressure. You know, you get to you get to see like the local characters, your sheriff and your commissioners and you know the city administrator. You know, you get to see how they respond when there's a bad situation. And I don't actually live in Fredericktown. I live in Farmington, up the road, but all that smoke like blew over our farms, and you can, you know the these, these local elected officials, they don't have much use, in my opinion, until it's time to push back on bullies, you know. And this court, you know, Corporation came in, built this factory. Don't exactly know what happened, but it caught fire, killed two and a half miles of fish in the community, yeah. And, and, you know, we there was a there was a meeting that just got leaked, and the lawyers from the Corporation had come in to meet with some of the county officials. But not all of them, not some of the more friendly ones, in my opinion. But I nobody is coming to save these small communities. Man, you know, we've seen it happen in Hawaii. We saw it happen in Palestine, Ohio. I don't think Fredericktown, Missouri is as bad as those things. But when, when something bad does happen in your in your your community, I think people are going to pretty much be on their own, you know? I don't think any new federal office is going to fix that, you know? Yeah,
Vance Crowe 1:08:21
because the only reason right now the federal government can swoop in and do anything is because they have no controls on the amount of money that they they can do absolutely whatever they want. Yeah, they can print as much money as they want. But if you're a local government and you decide, all right, we're gonna pull out all the stops and help all of our citizenry, oh, now we can't pay for our police. Oh, now we've taken all the money out to to pay for these other things, and there aren't reserves out there. I mean, there was some stuff on x about how there's been all these accounting games that have been done by these cities and counties to be able to make their numbers work, but they're way, way, way in the hole, and it's going to be incredible to see how it plays out. I have to have a dose of humility here, because I have not run for office. I don't go to community meetings. To me, I tried when I first moved to St Louis to go to some of these local meetings, and I was like, this is such a complete and colossal waste of time. And now that I have, you know, kids and a business, and my wife has a business, and we don't have any time. Like, I can't imagine being like, Okay, now I'm gonna go take some time
Ryan Cooper 1:09:27
tuesday at 10. Yeah, yeah, it's ridiculous, but yeah, it probably feels ridiculous to people in that room too. What you realize real fast if you go to like, four of those meetings, is the moment you cross the threshold, you're in a room with people who, 90% of them are paid to be there. You know, they work for this company, the state. You know, they work for this team. And when you cross the threshold, you kind of become an advocate of the state. You know? I mean, it's like, no, like, hey. I know that problem over there is the government's fault, but you don't understand, my little department is like doing good in the world. We need a little extra funding, you know, and whatever you can do to get that, and it's, it's just, yeah, dude, as long as it has endless funding, it will do whatever nonsense it wants. And eventually he put enough non productive people in roles of authority and give them unlimited resources, and they will start, I've just noticed this recently, they will start to mistake the sent resources as the solution to the problem. So Biden tweeted two or three days ago and said, You know, I'm he, I'm sure he's not the one tweeting, but his, his Twitter account comes out with, you know, we promised X number of billion dollars delivered to fight climate change, and we exceeded that. We sent this many billion dollars for climate change. And I just read that tweet, like, three times, like, Yeah, but, and then you realize, Oh no, this, this is the that this is the solution well,
Vance Crowe 1:11:06
and this is my money produces exactly what it's designed to produce. And that is what they were like. We told you we were going to distribute your the money that we either took from from people and directly from their taxes, or how we inflated away their money, and we gave it away to people that are on our team, that are that are saying they're fighting climate change. So it did exactly what they said they were going to do. Yeah, well, man, I could talk with you all day, but we got to wrap up. But before we do How are you doing local food? Tell people where they can learn about what you're doing. And, yeah, take something away from it.
Ryan Cooper 1:11:42
Yeah, we have a website, milk, bend farms, Alliance, calm. And we just deliver primarily milk off our dairy farm. But we do eggs when, you know, winter months gets tough on eggs, so you have to, you have to order a week ahead of time. And then, you know, local beef and pork, and really, whatever our our local farmers can contribute we and then we do a weekly Friday to your door delivery, and we've got one route going up to St Charles. So if there's anybody between St Charles and Fredericktown, let us know. Great man.
Vance Crowe 1:12:15
Well, thank you so much for coming down.
Ryan Cooper 1:12:17
Thank you so much, dude. Appreciate it. Hey. That
Vance Crowe 1:12:19
was great. Yeah, that was fun.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:21
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