Ungovernable Misfits

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In this special episode of PMM, Jon and Max get into the history and future of regenerative agriculture with Joel, a true pioneer in the field. Joel shares his journey from a young man with health issues to a leader in sustainable farming, emphasizing the importance of community, innovation, and resilience. He discusses the challenges of building a self-sustaining farm, the importance of soil health, and the role of Bitcoin in creating a new economic model for agriculture. Joel's story is one of perseverance, faith, and the power of community to overcome obstacles and create a better future.

Throughout the episode, Joel highlights the importance of character, commitment, and the willingness to work together to achieve common goals. He shares insights into the challenges of modern agriculture, the need for innovative solutions, and the role of technology in transforming farming practices. Joel's vision for a regenerative agriculture community is both inspiring and practical, offering a blueprint for others to follow. This episode is a testament to the power of determination, collaboration, and the belief in a better world.

IMPORTANT LINKS

• https://freesamourai.com
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• https://ungovernablemisfits.com

VALUE FOR VALUE

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 LAKE SATOSHI

Lake Satoshi is a private lake located on 130 acres of land in Mid-Michigan. Originally a gravel pit, Lake Satoshi has since evolved into a tranquil oasis for those who love the great outdoors and Bitcoin culture.

With the growing popularity of Bitcoin, Lake Satoshi has become a hub for like-minded individuals to network, camp, collaborate, and enjoy all that the property has to offer.

The Annual Lake Satoshi Retreat is a unique weekend-long event in August (8/02). Friday you can freelance and enjoy dinner on us! Saturday is the main event, packed full of BBQ and opportunities to learn about Bitcoin.

[00:00:00] Unknown:

Max is a very special episode of PMM,   an extremely mech to del one. We're gonna go through the history of the mech to del with one of the original OG mech to delians.  

[00:00:11] Unknown:

I don't think that was fair, mate. Don't call him special.  

[00:00:15] Unknown:

Special needs meets special ed. We're all here together.   Different levels of autism.   Hey. Here's an oldie oldie but a goodie. We haven't played John and Max. I hate you for a while. But just a reminder, buddy, who we're up against.  

[00:00:30] Unknown:

For your safety.   Big pharma,   big banks,   income tax,   VAT.   The Illuminati Elite, cultural Marxism,   critical theory.  

[00:00:54] Unknown:

Oh, they are nothing to us.   Nothing.   Not when we work hard. Not when we go from plebs to pioneers.   That's how we truly beat them. We sit there in that pleb level, we'll be there forever.   You gotta step one foot in front of the other,   climb that mountain to be a pioneer.  

[00:01:13] Unknown:

We have a true pioneer back on the show. Joel, welcome back.  

[00:01:17] Unknown:

Happy to be here, guys.   You're missing something in that little snippet, man. You're talking about big pharma. You're missing big agribusiness.  

[00:01:25] Unknown:

Oh,   we're totally due for a, a refresh on that. We recorded that, like, two years ago, I think. If you listen to the entire song, don't worry, Joel. We list a lot of enemies of humanity in there, but big agribusiness   certainly should be at the top of the list, and and you're certainly one of the warrior pioneers fighting against big agribusiness.  

[00:01:46] Unknown:

I mean, you talk about Bitcoin pioneers. Right? We're moving against this whole Henry Kissinger type idea of control of the food, the energy, and the money. In the Dick Kissinger.   Yeah. I mean, it's a three legged stool there of tyranny.  

[00:01:59] Unknown:

We have to take out all three of those. Why does Henry Kissinger sound exactly like George Soros? It's the same doctor evil kind of character. In the Dick Kissinger to George Soros, they've got the exact same   voice. One is Polish. One is Greek.  

[00:02:14] Unknown:

They need that evil man robe and the big hat. They wear it. Don't worry. Eyes wide shot style. They're both at the same parties. Just in secret while we're recording gay porn videos.  

[00:02:24] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. They are.   Hey. Let's go ahead and get to the boosts. That way we can check this off the list. Not that it's a chore. We love it. Get it out of the way. We'll get it out the way and talk with Joel. Hey, Max. I didn't color code these. So Oh. Why don't you read the first two, and and I'll go off. Okay. Chet with 10,021  

[00:02:46] Unknown:

stats.   Yo. I needed this listen. Appreciate you both. Both you mofos   more than you'll ever know. Mad love. Mad love to you too, mate. Yeah. Most definitely. We get a lot of positive feedback on that mentorship episode. We did. Yeah. We love you long time. Late stage huddle with 10,000 sats. I certainly feel like a larp most of the time, but generally speaking, aren't we all lapping as a living creature   in preparation for eternity? Either spend your time here trying to be good or maybe one day you answer for your sins before the Lord himself. Well, that's an interesting ad read. That's not an ad read. That is a boost. Or boost or call out or whatever we call these things. We get a lot of heartfelt boosts. People really listen to the episodes and think it through before they post how the episode affected them. I had a really interesting conversation  

[00:03:37] Unknown:

with a guy who was in the, like, agriculture world, true pioneer.   I don't know. It's maybe a month ago. You probably even heard me quote this one before, John. One of my sayings by one of my, like, mentors and sages.   He always says, if our father is a king and a creator, what would he be training his sons to be? I was talking with Kenneth Hamilton, who is one of the pioneers in soil sciences and nutrient density of beef and   the connection between food and human health and finishing of cattle. Like, this guy is totally cutting edge. You've probably heard the big names like Alan Williams and Steven Van Fleet and all those guys.   Kenneth is, like, I don't know, early seventies. He's ahead of all these guys.  

And I was talking to him. I was like, man, like, you've been doing this for decades. You're 70. What are you gonna slow down? They said, well, you know, buddy, I got this spiritual philosophy   everybody in Christianity is just waiting on their ticket to heaven. And I'm like, well, what are you guys gonna do when you get there? They're like, well, we're gonna worship. He said, what does worship mean? We're gonna sing. He's like, why suck at singing?   And he's like,   I believe that when we enter into the kingdom of God and the spiritual beliefs that he brings,   that we're going to be doing what God wanted us doing from the beginning, which is as children of God working to create and steward and rule the world he's given   us. He says, I wanna show up there with skills.  

And the skills I wanna bring are soil science of how to actually restore creation itself.   He said, I wanna learn how to coauthor with the soil, with the plant ecological diversity, with the animal, and then co author with God and bring that to the table where I don't show up as a useless just blep. I like that. That God wants you to be an active participant  

[00:05:15] Unknown:

rather than just a feather floating in the wind. Exactly.  

[00:05:18] Unknown:

And that was really interesting hearing from this old fellow who's just so far ahead as a leader in the industry. He's cool because he's a bit of a black sheep because the science he's doing is really truly measuring outcomes   in a way that's shining the light and holding the industry accountable. Because they've got all these thought leaders who'll go and test their stuff and compare it to his work, and they're all basically just lurking and not doing anything really advancing the edge compared to his stuff. So they all, like, hate on him and excommunicate him because his pursuit of truth holds everybody accountable.  

[00:05:49] Unknown:

Max, go ahead and finish that boost there, and and we'll get on with the rest of these. Did I not finish it? Yeah. There's a second part to, late stage autos boost.   See, this is why we need the color coding, mate. I apologize,  

[00:06:00] Unknown:

man. I just can't manage with this dyslexic brain. I know. I'm here for you.   I'll read the last bit. Or maybe one day, you answer for your sins before god himself.   I do really appreciate the comment about raising girls who won't need me one day. It's my biggest goal, but my greatest fear. The thought of failure or success are both terrifying. Trying to enjoy time with my children while they are kids   while also always considering their future as an adult is a juxtaposition,   And I don't think most humans fully understand   cultivate that passion   within them, protect that innocence, but also ensure they fully understand the world is ready to terminate all their hopes  

[00:06:44] Unknown:

and dreams at any moment. That's a great boost. So true. That is a great boost. I see these differences in friends of mine that have boys as opposed to girls. And it really is such a different mindset in raising girls. Yeah. You know, when I read that part of that piece that I wrote, honestly, I almost got a little choked up there because that thought of giving your daughters away to their husbands is deeply impactful. I had trouble getting through that Yeah. To be honest, but I rolled with it like a professional. I could hear it when you were reading it. Yeah. Oh. I tried to hide it. You probably hid it well from most of the audience, but I know you on such a deep level, mate. I I know see a feeling. So intertwined.   Next up is Eric FJ. Aspire to be less of a larp each day thanks to episodes like this. Great show. Also, your homophobia is so cute. Well, thank you. We try.  

Really makes you way less gay when you regularly make sure your audience knows you're totally not gay. That's right. That's some broke back level straightness we can all aspire to. Careful with the bears, you two. Bring protection and practice   safe and sex. Alright.  

[00:07:49] Unknown:

Apparently, I just jumped right in on that one making a gay porn joke about the elites. Oh, you did, buddy.  

[00:07:55] Unknown:

Eric FJ had an idea we were gonna go in that direction. Next up is Bubba. Oh, our good friend Bubba. Can't wait to see him at Lake Stoshi. He says, man, that article hit home with me. The revolution can't find the TV very well written.   I wish I could do that, but I like saying fuck you faggots way too much. As far as LARPing, it seems to be a sport these days, and none of them are Larry Bird. I'm a selfish bastard. I only care about my family and friends. The rest of the world can fuck off. Max, you could listen to two angry cunts. By the way, that's Bubba's podcast. That's his pod. Yes. It is. Yeah. Yeah. With his friend, Sylvia. Have you had a listen? I have had a listen. They recently did an episode on music where they both played some of the most impactful music in their lives. Okay. It was a great playlist. We'll have to get that playlist together from them. A lot of classic rock in there. It covers the history of rock and roll from the beginning. I think they start out with Elvis. He says never LARP and sometimes funny. See y'all at the lake, cold beer and smokes, mostly for health purposes, of course.   He has a quote here by Voltaire. To be a good patriot, you must become an enemy of humankind. It's interesting. He also says, so be a bad patriot except to those close to you. Work hard and quit acting like a bitch when no one trusts you to do what you say. Next up is Jason c, outworking everyone so you get to call the shots is a message I needed today. Cheers, John. Well, thank you, sir. Then he says, do you call them mevergolds over there? Yeah. Everyone does. Who knew? What would you call them, Joe? Yeah. So we're talking about gardening gloves. And in The UK, they call them marigolds. No. No. Not garden gloves. Like, when you're doing the dishes, you got the yellow gloves that go halfway up before,  

[00:09:36] Unknown:

marigolds. Right? Do you guys wear gloves? Yeah. There you go. Thank you. Well, no. I don't. But it's like a thing that people I'm a real man. I have a washing machine.   So   but it was a thing that people would wear, like, you know, doing the dishes, marigolds, like yellow gloves. You must have those in America. I have no idea. Thank you. Thank you, Joel. No? Okay. I mean, you guys are getting, like, manicures too? Okay.   Maybe. Yeah. On the case.  

[00:10:03] Unknown:

They're not savages.   I think I was talking about planting marigolds to keep, like, rabbits away.   I was talking about the flower. Max talking about gloves. Okay. Next up is Chad Farrow and 33 others. Y'all keep doing what you're doing, strong-arm. And he says you can keep these nuts. Okay. Well, thanks, buddy.   Up next is Jin. Do you people listen first or just boost? I would hope they listen first or boost and then listen and then boost again. That's my suggestion. More money for us. Yeah. One of my favorite boost hey. We need to chill now one needs a little bit of, like, cypherpunk sounding   background for when we read his stuff. Yeah.  

Yeah. Okay. I can work something in. Chill now one process dot start, fragmentation, human identity.   Do we remain prisoners of a system that consumes and destroys us, or do we dare to build a future that elevates us? This is our challenge.   Our moment lives on in those we lift.   Process dot end. Memory, replication.   And he's got a little image here. Listen to the birds,   not the news. That's great advice. It's working for me. If you consider birds to be real, if they're not real, don't listen to them.   Don't talk to them. Definitely not. Stack Jarrow on the article portion was definitely a good mentality   to break out of the mold of the Bitcoin NPC cult mindset of NGU.  

As is implied, Bitcoin can be used as a tool to help one improve oneself,   but it does not automatically do so. There are layers to this problem, and an especially important one in social capital as mentioned in rock paper Bitcoin   episode, and too hyper focused on Bitcoin, NGU is obviously detrimental to this as well. Joel, I think you could comment on that one there. How has that changed over the years for you where a lot of this was the Bitcoin MPC cult mindset of NGU?  

[00:11:52] Unknown:

So for   me, the way I even got into Bitcoin is I was trying to build kind of sovereign small businesses and communities.   And I started looking into   cash structuring laws where I guess dairy deposits too much cash in their bank account, the government seizes it and freezes it. And then you got six to eighteen month hold and you go out of business or, like, civil asset forfeiture, especially in this kind of big agribusiness, small farm adversarial environment.   And so I was looking for solutions to that, which is how I even found Bitcoin. And then this mesh to Dell type world, and I guess the best way to be just to quote Ben Gunn, like, you can't eat sats. This really important tool because weaponized credit creation is how it's assembling all the value to the parasites at the top, and we need a macro sized tool that undoes that to energize the real economy.   But from the very beginning, this has been something that's been on my heart. And I think there's a fair number of us who understand the connection between   number going up being part of what's giving us leverage against the parasites,   but   that value itself of a financial measurement is not enough to create a renaissance of humanity to undo everything that the parasites have cannibalized and destroyed.  



[00:13:04] Unknown:

Real quick, and I don't wanna go deep. How do you feel about Monero?   And has your opinion of Monero changed over the years, especially since, you know, samurai wallet being arrested and and charged and held? And and now that Whirlpool is back,   does Monero have less of an impact? I mean, can you both touch on that? That's usually not in my wheelhouse, but I'm I I wonder about people's,   view of Monero.  

[00:13:27] Unknown:

So my thoughts were shaped by Francis Polio, however you say his last name, the CEO of all Bitcoin. He gave this talk one time about   the connection between deep, real liquidity and privacy.   And his example was, like, say you need to do something in the real world business. You need to get low 6 figures liquid. With Bitcoin, you can show up in just about any city in any country in the world and find a hub of Bitcoiners who are moving some actual real value around. And getting in and out from real goods and services   into money and then back again   is a huge part of privacy.  

Because if you're using Monero and there's only, like, one or two people on a given state level region that are moving any volume, it's actually really easy to crack it because you're just getting cracked at the human interface layer. Software technical privacy may be there, and that's the whole debate of the inflation bugs and the pros and cons of different models of approaching privacy.   But getting back and forth in the real world is where the real gate is to where the intel operators or the opposition is gonna try to find people. Deep liquidity of large community using it in the real world is where real functional privacy happens. And I think we don't talk about that enough of the amount of actual participants moving real value around in Bitcoin   versus how much smaller Monero is in comparison and what that does to functional privacy.  



[00:14:53] Unknown:

Max? Mhmm.  

[00:14:55] Unknown:

You want my take on it? Yeah. My take hasn't really changed. I think even with Whirlpool back these days,   if I need to spend privately, I will use Monero.   If that isn't an option, then I will use   lightning to pay, but open channels with post mix Whirlpool because to me, that's the second best option.   But if I'm holding   anything significant, which doesn't happen too often, but when I do, it will always be in Bitcoin.   And I haven't found it difficult to move either   for cash or for swaps for any amounts that I personally do. I've never had that as an issue. And even on the swaps online, you know, the average size of these Monero swaps of I think it's Havino   is like 60 Monero which is $40,000   $50,000.  

That's like average swap size. So there's some liquidity there but it depends what your use is, I guess. I mean, my use for spending   Bitcoin on Monero is generally feed the family, go and buy meat from my butcher, go pay for gift cards to fill the truck up with diesel. It's that kind of stuff. I'm not in a position where I'm trying to move  

[00:16:06] Unknown:

huge sums of money. So maybe it's different. My question would be, of those guys moving real volume in Monero,   how many of them are within side of your trust circle versus guys you don't have a relationship with that could easily be some sort of just controlled opposition   that is there to just figure out where the liquidity is moving inside of what a given region. For me, it's about the same. And when I am  

[00:16:31] Unknown:

spending with Monero, it's normally for, like, gift cards and that kind of stuff just to, like, get by and live. For every person, it's gonna be a different threat model.   So there's a reason all dot net markets pretty much are Monero only. Basically, refuse   to use Bitcoin. It's because   even with Whirlpool back, unless you are very very skilled and knowledgeable,   the likelihood is you're gonna fuck something up. So it just depends. It depends what you're doing. It depends like the level of are you worried about three letter agencies that are tracking you? Well, you should probably know what you're doing then or are you just some random cunt like me that wants to buy a gift card and pay for their shopping?   Your threat model is quite different. But in terms of just spend privacy, there's no question there is better and easier. But, you know, I use both. I think they work hand in hand very, very well. I don't have any interest in anything else, but I like to spend privately and certainly with Whirlpool Away, it was very hard with with them gone. Long term here, I wanna leverage how we're creating a real circular economy of, like, paying people in Bitcoin and Mhmm. Selling food and cattle and all sorts of stuff in Bitcoin and moving pretty good volume  

[00:17:38] Unknown:

to where we start using PayJoin  

[00:17:41] Unknown:

and creating an actual pretty good privacy profile just from the volume moving in our local community. Can definitely do it, especially if you're using the tools. I think the thing is that you're looking at this in a similar way that I would or some of the people who care more about their privacy and the circular economy.   I just see it as it's a very small percentage of people who are actually using Bitcoin that the average person who I speak to or who's on Twitter is like fucking around   holding ETFs or holding it on a on the Coinbase or   maybe they have self custody, but they're not actually using it. They're just stacking.  

And then you have people like you or like Ben Gunn who are thinking about having these vertically integrated businesses and accepting Bitcoin and working it into your business and, like, trying to grow to something quite large. And that's really fucking cool, but it's just not most people. Most people are not actually walking the walk. We've got a really strong Bitcoin community here at Tulsa, Oklahoma too. I think people really underestimate the Bitcoin scene in Oklahoma  

[00:18:44] Unknown:

and just the sheer level of vibrancy   of active Bitcoin users.  

[00:18:49] Unknown:

Go, Tulsa. I wanna move things along. Next up is brother Abel. He's, like, instructions before leaving Earth. I don't know if he intends me to sing this. I think I think people always just set me up to sing something. Yeah. They do. They love your singing. Then they bitch at me for singing.   This is what that's what they do.   It's a trap, and there's no comfort fitting in a fake safety that no one believes in.   And if it goes against who you think you are, it's the death of happiness.   Go and get the crowbar. Go and get the Asic. Go and get the passport.  

[00:19:24] Unknown:

That's very  

[00:19:25] Unknown:

good. Appreciate that. Next up is mister Pies.   Max, I feel you on the whole podcast burnout thing. I felt the same way. I used to consistently week after week listen to forty to eighty hours a week of mostly Bitcoin or libertarian podcasts.   I've tremendously reduced that amount, and now I've gone back to listening to what I still can at 1.75   to two point o speed.   Psychopaths. Well, Pies, we always hope that you listen to one point o speed for Ungovernable Misfits programs because of our high level of production quality. Yeah. Please. But you can't change pies. He is who he is. He's who he wants. Next up is Stack Jarrow.   I said the pies jingle part out loud while listening to this. Where can I find the lore behind the chickadee jing? I   I know I think we played it on a Christmas   episode couple years ago, and Pies are like, that's my favorite song. Yeah. We did. So there you go. That's that's the lore behind Dominic the donkey song.  

Shadrach   It's my favorite song. Shadrach says great topics. Love   cigarettes and prayer. Thank you, mister Shadrach. Shadrach came down to visit you guys, didn't he, Joel? He did. He did. He's been here a couple times.   That's one of my favorite people. Driving around is rickety. It's not even rickety. It's the strangest thing, this Volkswagen   RV that he has.   Because you look at it and you go, poof, what's that thing go like? 25 miles an hour? It's pretty much like on a Passat frame. I think it's a VR six. But I I wonder, like, man, how long is that thing gonna last? Forever, it's a Volkswagen. If anybody's gonna make it last, it's Shadrach.   Love you, buddy.  

And last, but certainly not least, is Rosamond   Jakobowski.   That sounds like a good Pittsburgh name. Oh, Jakobowski.   She says first.   Were you the first to boost? Probably. Thank you very much, ma'am. And my favorite part of all of these shows,   it's happening soon. Lake Satoshi,   August second of this year.   Breathe in that fresh Michigan air.   Drink that fresh Michigan water. It's pure Michigan.   No lead, arsenic,   like Flint.   You're in Lansingburg, Michigan now.   Beautiful clear waters of Lake Satoshi.   Was tired. It's topped with fish, by the way.   It's got a healthy ecosystem Lake Satoshi does. You wouldn't know it. All them planes and just roll But it does. And you think of everything, those Lake Satoshi guys. They're permaculturalists.  

They're into it. You dive into that fresh, clear water,   look back at all your friends at the pavilion,   smiling back at you,   putting on a jet ski right next to you. Hey. You wanna ride, pal? Nah.   I think I'm just gonna   enjoy the fresh, clear water.   I'll be getting out soon, though.   Spending time with my good friend, Solex.   Love to see his smiling face,   his beautiful curly hair.   That smile's infectious, let me tell you.   Oh, there's Bubba rolling up on his gold wing. Hey, friend. How are you?   Glad you're here. It is fine. It's more than fine. It's pure Michigan.   It's Lake Satoshi,   August second of this year.  

I'll see you there.   Someday, I'll see you, Joel.   It is fine. I don't intend to see Peter McCormick, but he might show up someday at Duntos.   Hi. I heard there's a big party here.  

[00:22:50] Unknown:

A bunch of where are the plebs at?  

[00:22:52] Unknown:

It's coming. Lake Satoshi is coming, and I can't wait bringing the whole fan damnly,   setting up a mesh to del meshconomy   community there. You know, it's gonna be spread out like a village. You'll walk over to Otis Bittmeyer's coffee shop, listen to some tunes, play some vinyl,   have a great coffee,   come up to the hill where, Solex and I will be. Our families were there. Solex will be selling some wares, some custom made shirts. We'll have activities for the kids.   Kids can make their own shirts, design their own designs, and wear them and rock them out. Yeah.   Solex is bringing stuffs.  

So come visit us. Come visit the mesh economy at Lake Satoshi, August 2. Souleks is one of my heroes. I wanna come meet him in person so bad. It's an experience, let me tell you. He's just as wonderful in person as his online personality is. That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. He is authentic.   Joel Lake Satoshi reminds me of the early days before you bought the Citadel,   and there was this intention that Ben Gunn's gonna come with a load of wood, and he's gonna build a huge pavilion   and a place for all the plebs to gather and commune with each other and spend time with each other. And I'm sure that vision is still in your head, but you have been nose to the grindstone,   being a grass nerd, being a cow genetics ologist.  

I don't even know what that word would be.  

[00:24:14] Unknown:

Try geneticist.  

[00:24:16] Unknown:

Geneticist.   Thank you. I knew that was the word. I was just seeing if you did. Mhmm. Sure you did, buddy.   Give us an update on what you've been doing lately. It's a lot. We're gonna have to carve out a big amount of time for you to update everyone. Good grief. I mean, where do we even start? We had this mission from day one of understanding the connection between collapsing civilizations,  

[00:24:39] Unknown:

kinda late stage fiat economies, and   soil itself   as the first productive asset of a functioning society, and understanding Bitcoin as this, you know, reverse card to undo the weapon of credit creation that's used against us by the parasites to pull and suck all the air out of the room in the middle class and pull it back up to the top   to drive their   USAID and NGO funding to conglomerate power against the free productive people of the nation. Right? And so Bitcoin being a safe place where everybody has to come to to protect themselves, even our enemies have to use it. And the early participants in Bitcoin end up having all this stolen,   bad, immoral,   evil value   flow into our network that we get to use for the renaissance of the world to repair all the damage that's been done. And our goal from the beginning has been to be forerunners to we picked the industry of agriculture first because we believe it's the keystone. I mean, you need healthy food to have healthy people. You need healthy climates where people aren't sick in order to have a functioning society. And it's also soil is the first productive asset of any civilization.  

There's no production of food. There's no division of labor. And so we launched this project out of Bitcoin Twitter. Right? I joined Bitcoin Twitter in, like, 2019,   I think. I joined because I wanted to learn about Bitcoin and Bitcoin Twitter Reserve. I was hanging out at the time. There wasn't as many just concise places to go and read and learn about it back then. And it just ended up being this providential,   serendipitous   story where being obedient to this calling, I felt in my heart, unpack this whole path of opportunity. We're building in public. We for ran becoming leaders in an entire industry over the course of the last five years. I don't really know where you wanna dive in to start that whole story, John, but I meant a little bit of an overview of where we began. And now we're all the way out talking about Bitcoin and mainstream agriculture context while we talk about the impact of Triffin's dilemma and the Dutch disease and the US dollar and how that's gutted the rural agrarian economies and productive economies America   to help show the macro environment, but also teach about the micro practices, regenerative agriculture, restore the efficient production of the soy wind system so that we can become profitable and productive again as a society. And we're getting a lot of traction and a lot of energy and attention asking us to go out and talk about that and teach it, even drawing Bitcoin into those conversations.  



[00:27:04] Unknown:

I remember the feeling at that time. It was a lot more positive   during that 2019, 2020   run, and we brought so many different people on board with COVID. Everyone was looking for something true and something real, and we all seem to find each other during that time. And I found you on on Bitcoin Twitter,   and you were on TFTC and talking about soil health. And there's this one quote that has always stuck with me, and I use it all the time that, you know, that grass is the largest solar panel in the world,   you know, putting carbon back into the soil. And everything you said at that time made sense. But what really brought me to you is you weren't just talking about it, but you immediately got into it. How did you start the first farm in Virginia? You just went right at it and started with the Pineywoods cattle and turning that sandy soil. That was a horse farm. And I saw the soil on the other side that you weren't involved in, and it was completely different than the soil you built up just in a few years. How did you do that? How did you get started in all of this, just teaching yourself these deep, deep concepts  

[00:28:12] Unknown:

and then saying, okay. I want to do something much more with the community. I don't want to just raise cows and have healthy soil and do regenerative agriculture and rotational grazing and stuff. I want so much more. I want a community here. I want to commune with others. Oh, man. It has been a fun journey. I really wanted to spend this talk and just sharing the whole story uncensored with all the pieces I may have not shared before. It was cool with you coming to see the place, John, because I'd actually only managed the soil there for I think it was about a year. It's crazy. And the amount of progress we made in that one year period was massive. I got passionate about regenerative agriculture   because I had health issues. So in 02/2009,   when I went to college at VCU,   Richmond, Virginia, I lost about 20 pounds in, like, two weeks, like, in my very early in my first semester of college. My little brother had Crohn's disease. He got diagnosed at the age of six, which is basically unheard of with Crohn's. You typically don't get it until your late teens, early twenties. My mom had to go beat up the doctors to get a vaccine test him for it, and they were shocked when he finally, like, actually had a real diagnosis.  

And typically, if one sibling has it, it's a fifty fifty chance the other does. And so I got sick. I went to the doctors at VCU's campus. They put me on drugs,   and the drugs made my health worse. They made me suicidal. And I was just like, fuck this shit. I've seen my little brother go through this whole mainstream medical path. Like, even to this day, he's still on immune suppressants and things and not fully healthy. I was like, there's gotta be a better way to solve this. I'm not gonna follow that same road. So I got into kind of the Westin price, the, like,   health food world, kind of alternative holistic health treatments type stuff. I eventually just followed those questions all the way down. It's like, well, why is our soil not as healthy as it or why is our food not as healthy as it used to be? Well, like, our soil's been depleted. It's not as healthy as it used to be.  

And over time, that integrated with my love of history and macroeconomics   and understanding the rise and fall of civilizations and the history of, like, monasteries,   protecting little subsets of society during the collapse of societies in the dark ages, and then fostering and protecting a little   re outgrowth of that when society reawakens.   And it all kinda just tied together over a handful of years.   But so my passion started from the health food side.   And then I dreamed about being able to do this regenerative grazing thing one day. After college, a lot of my experience was kinda just blue collar trades, plumbing, carpentry,   on and on. I also interned with a physicist who was like a high-tech guy who would build new technologies, bootstrap a company,   flip it, then do it all over again. I got to be a part of him doing, like, big capital raises, surviving hostile takeover attempts. One of his companies, JBL, we've been trying to steal it from him. So I got to see all this crazy stuff about this dog eat dog world of high speed tech stuff. And then, like, one of his companies, he sold out. He ended up going with the company as, like, the VP who was running a skunk works division of tech inside this multinational corporation flying back and forth to China.  

And I got to be a part of him dealing with those large scale politics and people trying to outmaneuver what he's doing, and that was a lot of fun. And so then along the way,   I'm just this kind of normal middle class guy. Breakeven net worth, founded a small business in Virginia that me and Daniel ran. Daniel same Daniel you know, John. We were doing carpentry of wood privacy fences and black aluminum fences, mostly high end stuff in some of the fancy neighborhoods in Tidewater area of Virginia. This was, like, 2019, basically, same time I joined Bitcoin Twitter. I was hanging out with Daniel one day. We're just we didn't usually do this kind of stuff together, but we had some time and he'd gotten asked to go do a fence quote over in Suffolk, Virginia. I was like, hey, let's just go out to the country together. Maybe go hiking or swimming or something in the river while we're hanging out. And I'll just go cruise with you with the windows down, playing some music, having a good old time while you go do this quote. While we were there   doing this fence quote, it turned out that the place was a recreational horse farm that the lady had had her fences and her ditch mowed down by the city, and she needed us to do a fence quote for her to get her insurance claim and all that sort of at the city. And while we were doing the quote, she was just hanging out talking with us. And she had lost her tax deduction because recreational horses do not count as agriculture.  

And so she had a 100 something, maybe almost 200 acres of land.   And she'd been trying to lease it to farmers to get the tax deduction so that she could actually afford the property. And everybody was wanting to do like cotton or soy, and they wanted to spray like pesticides and fertilizers and all the stuff she didn't want on her property. And so she was just sitting there hanging out like, man, I really wish I could find one of those young people who wants to do this Joel Salatin regenerative grazing thing. And I was like, I'm one of those young people who wants to do this Joel Salatin regenerative grazing thing.   Because I'd always dreamed of maybe one day I'll make enough money when Bitcoin really pays off that I can retire and buy a farm and then just subsidize this hobby level enterprise because farming doesn't make any money.  

And I had read about Greg Judy and his whole idea of it's better to control the assets than owning the assets. And Mhmm. For anybody listening, basically, Greg Judy was a mainstream traditional rancher who went bankrupt   just about. And he pivoted his model to he went knocked on the door of a bunch of wealthy landowners   who had recreational hunting properties in Missouri. And he was like, Hey, I'll do regenerative grazing on your land. I'll run cows on it and I'll do all the maintenance. I'll cut all the roads. I'll build ponds.   I'll make this place beautiful for your family and the hunting.  

In return, what I want is just to lease all your ground for a buck a year. And so I'll make my money on the cows and I'll make your place better. And it went super well for him where tons of these families just end up giving them lifetime leases. He's got, like, 1,600   or so acres under management now.  

[00:33:51] Unknown:

In Greg Judy's first book, I mean, he talks about it. He just got a divorce, and he was working a normal fiat job and would just drive past all of these farms and thought about the opportunity.   He spun so much of that stuff up while still working a normal nine to five job and then doing this stuff at night. It just really reminds me of you and Daniel's journey. That's we're gonna go do some fences in the daytime. We're gonna do some landscaping, and then at night, we're gonna spend the rest of this up. This isn't your full time job at first.   It's very similar to Greg Judy's story.  



[00:34:22] Unknown:

Correct. Yep. Ranching in The US, your average ranch is losing one and a half percent return on assets per year if you don't factor land appreciation. The age of the average rancher is 58   years old. For every two older ranches retiring, there's one or less taking their place. I think it's 17,000   ranches have gone bankrupt a year in The US for the last, like, forty two years or something like that. It's only getting worse. Wow. So there's just all these dynamics   against productive   economy   in any sense. Agriculture first, but manufacturing second in The US, which we talk about a lot as Bitcoiners and where that comes from and why. But so I was talking with her, and I was like, hey. I'll do this. And a little bit further away from this now, I could be a little more blunt about this story because we've shown that we pulled it off. But when I signed that original land lease for 28 acres for a buck a year,   I had no idea how I was gonna buy cows. Like, the fencing was fine. I run a fence company. I could get materials.  

And so I'm hanging out, posting photos and videos on Bitcoin Twitter about, like, installing electric fencing and this project, and I'm gonna use Heritage Read Potty Woods. And but, like, I had zero clue how I was gonna afford to actually start. Like, have you guys ever had one of those moments in your life where you just feel called to something, like, either God's telling you, like, hey, go this way, this is important, or you just feel that your aim or something's just highlighted,   go here, you need to do this.  

[00:35:44] Unknown:

Yeah. Definitely.  

[00:35:46] Unknown:

A lot. It was one of those moments. My sage says it best. He says miracles take a lot of hard work   because you have to hold open the space until they arrive. And that's been a theme of our story where there's no way that the effort I've put in could have yielded the output of what we've done.   Input of effort does not linear equate to this infinite sum game of just magic that's happened.   We've done an enormous amount of   entrepreneurial creativity,   hard work,   but it's all been in this context of simply holding open space for   God and other allies to show up and coauthor this story with us and then what it's become. So I signed that lease, had no money, committed to do it,   and I'm just out there being faithful a little day in it.  

And I'm talking about this project on Bitcoin Twitter while I'm doing it. And a couple little providential things aligned at once. One, we had the Bitcoin bull run, which was awesome. I saw it coming after joining Bitcoin Twitter and really starting to grok Bitcoin.   And so I took out every penny of zero interest credit cards or debt that I could find, and I bought all in on Bitcoin at under $10. And at the same time, like, during the bull market, my Twitter account grew with it and we got more visible, which was awesome.   And along the way, I got DM ed by a wealthy Wall Street guy who was like, hey. This cow thing you're doing, I've been following you for a while in the Bitcoin circles. I want in on this project. And I was like, what? Like, no. You don't. I've never done this before, so I'm gonna learn in the school of hard knocks just like I always do. Just dive it in and figure it out. And, like, I'm trying to use   zombie apocalypse cattle to build this resilience.  

The sale barn hates them. They're hoarding spotted. I'll never make any money doing this. Like, there's no financial incentive here. Why? Why would you wanna be a part of this? And he wrote me back this letter. And mind you, this was before COVID. So this guy really had some wisdom to foresee what's coming in the world.   He basically was like, look. Like, I'm in investment banking. I deal with things like supply chains coming in and out of China. I deal with these mainstream financial marketplaces. And I've got some concerns. I mean, one, he was really leaning towards and starting to understand how The US is getting onto a war footing with China,   which we're seeing more and more now.  

He also was leaning in and understanding how much of our food security in America is dependent upon things like the amino acids for most animal feeds are produced in China. A lot of the medical inputs are produced in China.   Like, so many things that we're dependent upon for logistics   are key things here in The US are actually being produced by foreign adversaries,   which is not a good position to be in. So he understood that, and he wanted food security for his family.   He also had gotten into the health world and gotten really concerned about vaccinations   and the overemphasis   on allopathic medical care for children.  

And he was starting to get really concerned about   stuff sneaking into the supply chain for animal products, whether that's what we see now with mRNA vaccines   or even just the heavy use of anti parasites that are fat soluble, accumulating the meat, which you don't want for your kids, and on and on. So he wanted food security   in the food quality sense, not the caloric quantity sense.   He wanted to be uncorrelated   from mainstream markets to where he owned hard assets   that did not have supply chain and input dependencies.   And   he wanted to own those things inside of trusted relationships   because he foresaw the debanking of conservatives,   bank bail in risks, and seizing of like retirement accounts and all these sorts of things, even before COVID had happened where he was worried about it. And so his goal was, I want to own   these hard assets that are inflation secured because they're real things. I want them to not be tied to risky supply chains. And on top of that, I want the added benefit of just food security for my family. I was like, oh, well, I think we could do something with this.  

He didn't wanna farm, didn't wanna be on the board of a farming company or anything like that at the time. He just wanted to build a relationship he could trust and then have the guy go take care of it. And so we sat down and put our heads together and we came up with the herd share program   because one of my non negotiables was I really want to have full authority here to push the edge and learn what I'm doing,   develop genetics, drive for and for run grazing practices.   And so   we built this program where   he built the trust with me to trust that I was gonna be honest and I was gonna be confident in what I was doing, gotta learn and figure it all out.  

And he bought the breeding stock   and I had full control of the management of the breeding stock. And then every year when the calves were weaned, we'd split the calves.   So I would get the lion's share of the calves for funding the farm and the operations,   and then he'd get a little bit of real yield on top of the just turnover of us keeping young, the genetics of the breeding stock that he already owned.   Okay. So we're there, and then he buys my first, like, 18 cows for me. I'm starting to get all that turning over and happening.   So I've taken the step of faith to start doing it. The miracle showed up miracle number one, that all of a sudden, boom, COVID happens.  

My phone just blows up. All his buddies are calling me. All these other people are calling me and they're like, Hey, We're really concerned about food security because you guys have heard during COVID. Right? Grocery stores were empty. You couldn't get slots at the butcher. Everybody want food, and everybody's nervous about security for the future.  

[00:41:07] Unknown:

You remember all that, John? I remember having some conversation with you at the time. Oh, sure. Yeah. And that's when my partner and I really started to think about all these things. What are we gonna do? What's our family gonna look like during this time when we need things? And we need to grow closer together as families and commune with one another and build resources. That was really these conversations that we would have spending eight, ten, twelve hours a day together. We've really decided that we need to build our local community out, you know, for safety, for food security, for health, for medical, for resources, and all these things that we talk about. Now they're eight forms of capital. We need to build them together. That's when we got super serious about all that stuff. That's also the same time where I was exposed to your message,   and we would talk about the things that you were talking about. I'm like, wow. We really need to start raising our own food.  

And that's when he and I both got into more homesteading activities.   Yep. I remember  

[00:42:00] Unknown:

early days speaking to you, Joel, as well. The first time I'd really considered not only, like, the supply stuff, but also just the quality of I was always like, well, beef is beef is beef. And there's only one way to do it. Once I'd heard about the regenerative stuff   and the difference between the quality of the beef that you're eating and then looking into the health stuff, it was a real wake up where I was like, the money's fake and the food is fake. If you don't have the right food and start thinking about your health, which is something especially with the price increases of Bitcoin where a lot of people have a little bit more time   to look after themselves and have a little bit less of the stresses that the financial constraints   you had previously. It's like where do you spend your time? It really needs to be health and food So I really woke up to that, and it's something me and John talk about a lot is where's your food from? What are these relationships   like with the people that you get your food from? What is your food eating? And is it full of microplastics and other bullshit and chemicals? And if it is, you probably need to think  

[00:43:02] Unknown:

about it. Yeah. One of the things we've really gotten into   in this last six to eight months here at the ranch is this idea of therapeutic grade food and what's the actual upper threshold of what's possible and how food can advance healing and human health.   There is just layers and layers there, unexplored realms and places that could be advanced,  

[00:43:22] Unknown:

and that could be a whole even show in itself. I dig into some of those pieces in regenerative agriculture context of podcast interviews I'm doing. Joel, so let's get back to that part of the story where COVID hits and now people are starting to DM you. They're concerned about about food safety,   food security,   quality of food, and they think that you can play a vital role in that for them.  

[00:43:43] Unknown:

So at the time, I knew I had something really special with this herd share   model. And we had launched this little thing that we were calling, like, the cattle cooperative. The goal was to build this nonprofit   to where we took this model of this new capital structure of community oriented farming   to where   you're building a tighter knit relationship between producer and consumer, where   you're no longer just an atomized   separated individual who share very vastly different time horizons,   but to where you're sharing the capital costs, the risks   profiles, and the same time horizons   to be knit together as productive ecological stakeholders.  

One of my guys here says it really well that our goal in this kind of Citadel mindset is to function together as middle class families to play the same game the ultra high net worth individuals   do. Because of leading together in unity,   we can do the similar stuff of asset allocation, labor allocation, strategic maneuvering,   local politics,   and narrative building, and all these things to shape the world. Right? And so with the cattle coop, the idea was to open source this model we built and   help consult with other farmers   to copy this herd share thing   to put the capital cost back in reach of the young generation to make farming possible.  

Because just inflation and everything has run away where young people just cannot afford to enter into the world of farming. In The US right now, 89%   of ranches are less than a 100 cows. Average herd size of that tranche is 22 animals.   Almost all of those are subsidized   hobby farms that are run for the purpose of a tax deduction, and the families that run them have full time city jobs.   So knowing that was a problem, we were trying to leverage this model to consult the farmers.   And in hindsight, this makes sense, but it didn't go very well.   I grossly underestimated   the amount of skill needed   to implement the model I built. They say in the regenerative world that people struggle with it because you have to be both a farmer and a marketer   To run this community oriented system the way that I'm building it, you've gotta be able to be a farmer, a marketer, a politician, a hedge fund manager,   a patriarch and community leader, really detail oriented accountant and software database systems manager. Like, there's all these different hats.  

And trying to copy the model proved really difficult because,   one, like, the brain drain from farming, everybody who has really high IQ just goes and becomes   a finance manager guy in the hedge fund world or help trade meme coins.   And the real productive economy doesn't pay well. So the number of really high quality people left in the industry with the really high IQ and competence is not very big anymore.   And because of the lack of profitability in the industry too, there's not very large teams that can bring all these skills to bear. So you end up needing, like, one guy who's really good at wearing a bunch of hats.   And I underestimated   how much my obedience to what I felt called to earlier in my life, which taught me so many things and how that prepared me for doing and leading what I'm doing today. And so I had put a ton and ton of effort into trying to build that out, help other farmers do it, and just never made any good progress.  

And so then COVID really accelerates, and a few things happen. I mean, one, the threat model around farming changes.   These little smaller homestead scale farms don't make as much sense now as they used to because they need to be more defensible in this more adversarial environment.   Supply chains, inputs, logistics,   all that really starts to become something that's really more important because the functional economy is collapsing more aggressively, and you need to scale a little bit to do more of that in house. At the same time, everybody's getting super concerned about this and wanting to solve it. That's where we just need leadership to raise a banner and say, hey. Let's just go do something about this. Right?   So I pulled in basically all of the highest quality   people   that were inside of those conversations   that I was already having. And I was like, hey. Let's just build a scaled proof of concept operation   together   that's larger than what we were originally thinking about for any one of us. We've got all these people calling me and DMing me concerned. They're like, hey. I want somebody's heard share of things that this guy has because I'm really concerned about food security now. I was like, we got appetite for   this. Let's just pull together and just go get this done.  

And so we started looking for land. We built this kind of whole   analysis of this freedom matrix of different states in The US. We had some conversations about being in The US versus other places.   My thesis is with The US,   during times of chaos,   a people or society defaults back to their origin or creation story or myth,   which in The US is very oriented around rebellion and freedom. And we have a political system built around federalism and local power, which has been eroded at the time. But there's pieces of that still in place that it gives us ability to push back against tyranny. And   the possession of firearms in the population is really high because ultimately all political power flows from the consent of the governed.  

And so the ability to say no and push back and the willingness to do so, I would argue, is higher in The US population than it is anywhere else.   And having some political tooling to enable that.   So we looked at a bunch of different states. We looked at, like, homeschool laws, firearms laws, like, the reaction to the vaccine and mask mandates. And we were originally looking at, like, Kentucky,   Tennessee, Texas, like, all these different places.   We were looking the hardest at Texas, and we ended up going with Oklahoma. I had a buddy who was one of my big white collar allies here, super poetically connected. And we were like one day, like, why are we looking at Oklahoma? He's like, well, nobody ever looks at Oklahoma. I was like, well, that seems like a pro, not a con.   So we did the little analysis in Oklahoma, and Oklahoma beat every other state we're looking at plus had better land prices.  

So a handful of us got together.   We pulled some capital, and the first property we found seemed way too big and way too expensive. We just wrote it off, started looking for somewhere cheaper. That first property just echoed in all of our hearts and minds. And so I got the whole crew together, and I was like, hey, this seems like the right place. Do you guys feel that way too? And they're like, yeah. I was like, alright. Let's take three days and pray about it and then reconvene.   And we did, and we reconvened. Everybody's like, yeah. This is it. I was like, okay. Like, this is a big one. Can we do this? They're like, well, almost. I was like, okay. Well, if we're all in agreement, then I need to go actually draw in some larger community and some larger support and grow this out a little bit more so we can run and go do this. And so that's where I started going out more aggressively on the podcast circuit and talking about the Citadel project. And we already had some credibility around this whole narrative. I don't remember when I recorded that Citadel theory talk in Miami. John was late twenty nineteen or early twenty twenty. Do you remember when that was? I think 2020.  

[00:50:32] Unknown:

Maybe mid twenty twenty. Yeah. I have a file somewhere on my phone of all of your appearances   because some of them started to get, like, erased from the Internet.   Yeah. I remember you saying some people are, like, pulling these podcast episodes, and I was like, shit, I better go and collect them up and archive them. It's somewhere on my phone. Yes. Some of them are definitely still missing. The ones I did with Safedine are all gone. I don't have any copies of those anymore.  

[00:50:57] Unknown:

So that whole interview   was with, Mark Moss,   and it was around this idea of how do we build defensible sovereign communities that are capable of asserting their freedoms in a world that's increasingly more tyrannical? It's just the whole   philosophy and theory of this complex forms that tyranny are taking and how the tools and monopolies of power work, and how do we cunningly outmaneuver them. Right? At that time, I wasn't telling people I was gonna go do this, but now I'm actually looking at going out and doing this,   which for me was kind of a poetic full circle. Because I mean, I remember even having conversations with my mentor back in, I don't know, 2011,   2012, 2013   about filling this call in my life to, like,   build the ark, build Goshen, build this place of safety as, like, oaks of righteousness to shelter people from the storm to   kinda shepherd society through to a better place again on the out on the other side of the chaos. And so it was funny seeing all these little threads connect and tie together. And so I ended up going out and starting to raise capital for it. I'm sure you guys remember that one because that was when Bitcoin was starting to go up like crazy.  

And then the middle of it, Bitcoin fell from 69,000   down to 40,000, which was fucking painful.  

[00:52:08] Unknown:

I remember it well.  

[00:52:10] Unknown:

When you're going through that fundraise, I I was talking to Max, you know, because we were saying, well, we should get Joel back on the show to talk about the fundraise and everything. And I was involved in that a lot of the group discussions and prayer groups and such. And, Max was like, well, how much does he need? And I said, I think they need, like, a million. And Max goes, SATs?   Always a smart ass.  

[00:52:38] Unknown:

Yeah. Yeah. I think all said and done on the project, we're about 5,000,000 in now on year  

[00:52:43] Unknown:

four. Wow.   Dollars, not cents.  

[00:52:46] Unknown:

Yeah. Dollars. Yeah. We've been playing real size games. It's Mhmm. It's not like we're doing little small stuff.   So when Bitcoin fell, my whole community and network around these Bitcoiners, including me, and we were all super exposed to Bitcoin. Like, we were expecting that bull run back in 2020 to break a 100 k, and it got robbed from us by FTX and all their paper Bitcoin and nonsense that eventually ended up percolating out to the mainstream banking sector and almost took down a good chunk of The US economy. Right?   And so it's not like everybody's net worth went down in a linear manner and they still had this   value they could put towards ideological projects. We all had to tighten our belts and just survive, including all the people who committed capital.  

I mean, I had, like, $3,000,000   in capital committed, and, basically, it all dried up. We didn't go from 3,000,000 to, like, 2,000,000. We went from 3,000,000 to a couple $100,000   that actually is gonna stay the course with us.   It was brutal.   And so once again, an act of faith, one of our inner circle guys paid the deposit on the property. We had it under contract. That was a 6 figure spend. And I hit the streets going to try to raise capital, and I worked my fucking   ass off. Yeah. I remember. Where, like, I was probably working twenty hours a day just out there doing interviews, out there DMing, talking with people, phone calls. I hardly even ate a meal for almost three months. I was just sitting in the upstairs cave   with a gallon of raw milk beside the bed, working just   not even sun up to sun down, like, the clock all the way around squeezing in, like, four hours of sleep here and there. And   the Citadel project, I understood that this needed to be something that was strongly ideological driven rather than financially incentivized   Because there is no financial incentive for fixing the world that's really relevant on a short time scale. Not to compete with the returns of Bitcoin or meme coins or stock tech stocks. Right? This is all thinking in forty or a hundred year time horizons of trying to restore the world to build trees under which you'll never sit.  

To overcome   so many broken things that nobody's paying to fix. And so, like,   the structure of the investment vehicle was hilarious.   So we had a land holding company. It was an LLC   that here are the terms.   We're gonna buy a piece of ground. We're never gonna pay any sort of cash flows or leases to this land holding company because farming is not profitable. And that's considering farms that are trying to maximize productive flow. Forget fixing ecology and forerunning this restoration of rural economics and sovereign communities. Like, that's all gonna cost too.   So you're gonna own this land with us. It's never gonna pay anything.  

And we're never gonna sell it. So you're gonna own this asset that's gonna look like it has value to you on a piece of paper, but you're never gonna realize it. Who wants to join us?   Oh, oh, me.   Oh, man. And I was super upfront about all this from day one. Some people really understood what I was trying to do of communicating good expectations   to where, like,   I really intend to live with honor where I'm gonna tell you what we're doing upfront and go out there and just put in the work to get it done. But, man, like, some people got upset with it.  

[00:55:55] Unknown:

I'm sure you guys remember the character assassination that happened. More than some. There were a lot of tire kickers, you know, that I noticed that come in and be super interested and be like, well, this is the minimum investment and these are the terms.   Like, okay. Well, now I get it. I just wanna kick the tires and see what's going on. See you later.   There were people that were deeply, spiritually, and ideologically   connected, but then when you told them, hey. This is going to be difficult, and it's there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering in it. Are you willing to suffer with me? Yeah. No. Not so much. I was just hoping I was gonna be able to kick in a thousand bucks or 2 and have some meat that they totally ignored the spiritual aspect of what you were doing. Forerunning the restoration of the world, which I believe is our duty as Bitcoiners to flip everything from parasites to  

[00:56:42] Unknown:

the renaissance of pioneers of restoration. I was thinking earlier during the boost, John, there's this thing that Eldridge says that there's these key principles of how the world works. And there couple of them are, like, things are not as they appear, and we live in a world at war. If we don't understand that, we don't comport ourselves in a way that's effective   to   understand reality in order to change it. Like, my sage also has a saying that in order to make an impact on the world, you have to understand how deep the darkness goes.   Because only through understanding that can you outmaneuver   it to overcome the challenges you're going to face along the way. Up until this fundraise, there's a few different layers of stories here. But, man, like, I'm sure you remember, John, just how much energy I had on Bitcoin Twitter in that 2019, 2020 area. Yeah. There were a lot of people that were all about Joel. We basically   almost single handedly controlled the narrative around   restoring American food security,   restoring the soil, and the return to hard money and the connection between it all. I had gotten a lot of invites to some really big podcasts, and I turned it down   because I didn't wanna go too loud because I knew that there's adversaries to this.  

Whether you're talking big agribusiness in The US itself or you're talking foreign adversaries that don't wanna see the restoration of American food security,   there are strongly vested interests that do not want a strong middle class   in a decentralized manner producing no value and capable of defending it. And so I tried to stay quiet. I tried to, like, kinda raise this inside a small circle with this kind of Bitcoin tribe without getting too, too loud. And   when Bitcoin crashed, I had to get louder than I originally wanted to. And I knew I'd gotten too loud when I had a friend tell me that I'd gotten mentioned from the stage of the National Angus Beef Convention. Like, somebody in passing had brought up, like, the project and some of the things I was doing with herd shares. Like, this is the future of American agriculture. It's like, damn it. Like, this is gonna bring way too much attention. My way, I'm gonna have to deal with some battles and things I didn't want to.   Along the way, I had some guys that,   one in particular,   I knew actually had a background in intelligence in the intel world. He had tried to kinda smoosh his way onto my team. I knew he was not a good actor, and so   I knew he had some sort of intent to disrupt what I was doing or disrupt this movement of restoring food security in America.  



[00:59:05] Unknown:

I have a picture of who this might be in my head. There's more than one of them.  

[00:59:10] Unknown:

Yeah. One in particular. But, yeah, there's one in particular. There's a few different instances of this happening, and   my typical MO was   I need to build enough momentum to better defend what I'm building. And at the early four running kind of baby stage,   you don't have the capacity to just dominate things and protect it because it's kind of fragile. So I strung these guys along a little bit, Talking with them, letting them feel like I might let them in the door to be a part of my project, kind of dangling hope in front of them where, like, they might be able to, like, come in and try to capture what I'm doing as if I'm naive enough to let them do it. Back to quote of scripture, you gotta be cunning the serpent's innocent doves. Right? If I give them a hard no, they're gonna immediately start to try to do something external to then run me over, and they're well funded enough. They could build faster than me. Right? Which this isn't for the sake of my own project. This was for the sake of, like, I don't want there to be astroturf   operations that had more momentum than me to stop the message and the power to catalyze change of food security in America.  

So I did that. I strung them along. Eventually, those guys figured it out. And that's where I had these big character assassination attempts and all sorts of things happen against me.   Like, some guys tried to go and   leverage   my brand name and my ideas to build, like, this cattle fund.   And they were in the Bitcoin community, and I had to call them out and publicly announce, like, hey. This person's leveraging my name   and my ideas to raise capital. I am not working with this person.   And then when I did that, then they start straight up tried to steal everything, and they publish some of my ideas,   big magazines and stuff to try to just steal that energy and pull it towards them. And so I had to defend that. And then, like, during the peak of the fundraise itself, I had the character assassination attempt where good lord. Was that crazy? Like, there was a hit piece website where they'd stalk my private life, and   they stalk me in private chat groups for, like, six months, and they had nothing. There was no real dirt. I mean, it's part of the value of living character. Like, to quote Jesus again, that the enemy is coming for me. He's got nothing on me. So everything was just They didn't know about the dogging. John was saying that was your pastime. The dogging? The dogging? What do you mean?  



[01:01:18] Unknown:

You don't have that in America? This must be some weird British saying that we don't know, John. It's always some weird British thing he does to me. It is. I've always gotta throw something in there. If you don't have it there, it's great. Great pastime.   It's where British people pull up on the side of a road, usually sort of like by a golf course or slightly public space,   and then there's just large gang bangs with all the truckers   and the farmers  

[01:01:43] Unknown:

and the chaps. And John was saying that was your thing. I had said to Max one time, like, were you dogging me? You know, where where we was you, like, you you're trying to give me a hard time you dogging me? And he's like dogging? No mate.   You know their version of dogging isn't isn't our version of dogging. Quite different. That's hilarious.  

[01:02:03] Unknown:

Yeah. So you were you were being dogged but you weren't dogging. Yeah. Just just to be clear. Well that's good. Exactly. Hit piece websites,  

[01:02:11] Unknown:

stalking private chat groups, publishing stocks and information.   They were dog piling anybody on Twitter for a multi month period that said anything positive about me trying to cut off the energy going towards a fundraise at the end of the project.   They were hosting Twitter spaces. Like, it was so wild. Like, they were doing   ten hours a day of Twitter spaces solely focused on trying to break my reputation and calling me a scammer and telling lies about me.   And that went on for over three weeks. It was wild. It was   it burned some friendships that I really wish hadn't been burned.  

Like, lies have power   Mhmm. Even when they're not true. Because in a world where everything's so on social media, where it's all these just faces of generated identities,   most people don't have enough real relationship to know what's real and what isn't. Due to that dynamic that   people were trying to protect their own social capital for their own livelihoods,   like big podcasters that I was friends with that had supported me along the way, with the sheer amount of noise against me, it was able to make it feel like anybody who was close to me was being, well, they were actively being targeted.   And people didn't have the courage to face that with me. It's just a simple blunt way to put it. I watched them drop like flies.  



[01:03:27] Unknown:

I really did, which was good, which was cleansing. If you can't survive these minor slings and arrows, then I don't think you were built for it in the first place. So c'est la vie.  

[01:03:37] Unknown:

Yeah. I'm I'm honestly in the looking back grateful for it because it purified what I had as far as the people around me to where  

[01:03:44] Unknown:

You took it hard at the time, and I'm sure that was extremely stressful.   I know. I I had the conversations with you. I had the prayer calls with you. It was it was a lot for all of you guys to endure, but you got out the other end of it.   And so let's move on to actually   purchasing the property and, like, your first steps in in building things out now that you had at least enough money to get going. Maybe not to realize all the things that you wanted to realize at first, but enough to get your foot in the grass.  

[01:04:13] Unknown:

Yeah. So it was funny because   what was intended to destroy me actually ended up launching me. So the land holding fundraise, we ended up raising   about $800,000   on those terms, which is awesome.   The first good chunk of change was literally people who would DM me. I'm like, hey. I was having a morning prayer time, and I felt the call of my heart that I'm supposed to   put $50,000   in to launch your project.   I've already made the decision to do it. I don't really understand the details of what you're doing, so we need to have a phone call so I can at least know a little bit about it before I send you a check. And I was like, okay. Let's have a call.   And that's where the first big chunk of change came from to get us launched.  

Second to that,   there were some early Bitcoiner guys who I'd been friends with for a while over, like, the twenty nineteen times of me growing out this mission and vision and all these stories.   And what ended up happening   was   these guys saw these guys trying to stop me from going out and changing an industry leveraging this Bitcoin ethos.   And the character assassination just pissed them off. Like, they weren't planning on giving me much capital, like, to begin with because they didn't really feel like it was part of their mission.   But when they saw the adversaries trying to stop me, they were just like, fuck this shit. Go get it done. And I had a couple big checks get written just purely out of just   spite because these guys didn't want to see these people stop me,   which was awesome. Okay. So we bought the property. I went quiet to just put my head down and start building.  

We brought 13 cows with me from Virginia.  

[01:05:46] Unknown:

John, you actually came out to the farm in Virginia and helped me load up those suckers. I I did. I fought some cows for you. I fought some cows. That was a lot of fun. I didn't know near as much about cattle handling then as I know now. It was a lot of fun. You know, I I think I came back and I told Max. I was like, man, Joel's super hippie dippy about stuff. We did a whole section on it. We did. Walking around barefooted,   you know, saying you need to direct your energy to the cows this way. And and Max, you know me, and and Joel too, I'll just Yeah. You know, butt right up against something, charge full head. So that was difficult for me to understand.   But Joel and, you know, his partner there really have, like, a spiritual connection with these animals. It's so much more than nuts and bolts and science. There's heart and there's spirit in there. So I learned a lot about that   with the animals. And I think on our small operations,   we carried that same thing. I told the story of us losing a cow and Andy and the sun and I looking all through the neighborhood for this cow for weeks and we find it in the pasture   and it just kept running and running and running. We had a whole big fence area set up and a chute and going into a trailer. And then I explained that concept to Andy and his son, like, listen, man, we just kind of need to be with the animals, the herd animals. They don't want to fear, like, we're predator pressure upon them and direct your energy from your solar plexus in this way, and it absolutely worked. I'll never question Joel ever again on any of that stuff.  



[01:07:09] Unknown:

Yeah. I've gotten a lot more into stockmanship stuff now where our skills moving animal crowd are so much higher than it was when we were at that trailer back in Virginia. Oh, I I can only imagine.   Oh, man. Like, we got to spend time with Don, who is one of Bud Williams' students,   who is just   a guru, an absolute savant of cattle working. Like he can just go park a open trailer with no fencing in the middle of a big set stock operation with three, four hundred mama cows and a bunch of bulls. And And he could just walk out on foot, just kinda look at the bulls, and they'd separate themselves from the females and just step on the trailer. With an open door, he'd go get three of them. They wouldn't like Holy shit. Yeah. Like, he's a freaking magician. Like, unbelievable.   It's like Jedi mind trick. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. We got to spend some time with one of his students, and I feel like a little kid, man. I love it when you meet somebody who's such a deep, knowledgeable, just experienced person in the world that you just feel like this kitty little kid sitting at their feet, like, tell me everything because I know nothing compared to you. It's just such a good feeling. But, anyway, so, Cause I know nothing compared to you. It's just such a good feeling. But anyway, so we brought 13 cows from Virginia. And so when we bought the property, we had basically about eighteen months of runway just to cover the carry costs.  

That's no money for labor, no money for infrastructure, no money for cattle. Just an act of faith of knowing we're called to this. We've got some support and we're supposed to just go get this done. So that's where I went out and started hitting the streets, raising money for herd shares.   We ended up raising about a million and a half dollars in herd shares in three years. We scaled up from 13 cows originally to we're gonna cross 500 this year, probably. So that'll put us in the 1% of ranch sizes in The US, which is awesome. Along the way, so much of that was just stories once again, a miracles and father's favor of sending us out buys at the key times. Like two winters ago, we were in a situation where I think we had 180   cows or something then, And we really need to be over 300 to be cash flow viable just to having a large enough productive engine to cover the carry cost of the property.  

So if I were to sell every expensive capital good that I could get away with not having, So tractors, fuel trailers, all those sorts of things.   We, two winters ago, had six months capital runway. We only had a 180 cows. We're not even economically viable size. So we need to scale up the asset base itself.   We had no way to get there besides just, like, drawing in more herd share participants to go get more cows. We ended up having   a guy who is from the tech world. He is   a project manager at a really big paying tech company who's you guys know. He He wanted to retire and get into regenerative agriculture. He'd gone to, like, Greg Judy field days.   His dream was to just finish out a couple years working at this tech place, stack a bunch of money, and then retire and then start doing some regenerative grazing stuff. And he had DM'd me, like, hey. Like, I'll go into these field days. I wanna actually put my hands on with some guys doing this and see if I'm tough enough to do real hard work with manual labor like this. Like, can I just come out and work a long week with you guys and see if I can do it? I was like, yeah, man. Come on. So he came out, looked really awesome. We really liked him. He really liked us. I ended up pitching in on like, hey, instead of just retiring in years to go do this at such a small scale, it's never gonna really pay for itself. Why don't you just jump in and build this with us? We talked about it, wrestled it out. He ended up investing   and we spun off the agriculture entity. So at the Citadel project, we've started everything by having a land holding company and then a headquarters company.  

The goal had always been to use the headquarters company to forerun,   like, synergistic small business enterprises. And then once they hit a viable scale, spin them off into into sub entities   and then stack small businesses that are all serving the same mission beside each other. Like, some of the next ones will probably be, like, a mechanic shop with, like, fabricating abilities and all that. So he spun off the ad company. He put in,   low to mid 6 figures of capital in that, and then he committed to coming out and visiting quarterly for, like, a three to five day period, helping remote with some admin work, and then moving here in two years, which was supposed to be in February 2025. And that was just a really well timed moment of provision of a new ally coming on board that God sent us.   And that bought me enough space to be able to have time to raise more herd shares and get scaled up to survive that hard time and transition all the way to where we are now. There was so many just miraculous little providential stories along the way. Herdshare participants   who called me much like with those early land supporters,   or even just brass tacks logistics problems where, like, we have these piney woods as our base mama stock for the zombie apocalypse durable cow we're trying to build. And I had worked really hard to find some good composite bulls to kind of beef them up a little bit to still have the hardiness and trying to build this ultra density grazing capable animal. And I had bought three bulls from a farm over in Missouri,   and two of them ended up showing a genetic defect of prepuial prolapse, which is basically where their penis doesn't go back into their sheath. It kinda hangs out, has a tendency to get injured, and that axle has Max has the same problem.  

And, it has correlations to genetic defects on the females too.   And I had worked so fucking hard to find good bulls that matched what I was looking for. And I'm sitting there one day like, damn it, man. Like, I've gotta call these bulls. It took me a year to find these. I'm only gonna keep one of of them. I need genetics. I need genetics to be able to build what I wanna build   here. And so I make the culling decision,   and now I'm down to one bull getting close to breeding season. I'm like, what the hell am I going to do? And the next day my phone rings. It's a guy up in Colorado   and he's like, hey, I've been following you for a while in Johan's Eastman's WhatsApp group, which that was another awesome situation where I was kind of into the Greg Judy thing.  

And somebody on Twitter recommended the Johan's book. It's like, look, this is the bible. How do this right? It's it's just way better than everything. And I've read it. It just rocked my world and changed everything for me as far as how we handle our practices. And I ended up getting an invite into Johan's actual private WhatsApp group with hanging out with the grazers around the world implementing this stuff. He's a South African guy. Right? Correct. Yep. And a big leader in the management intensive grazing community.   I mean, not even just a big leader. Like The guy. He is the guy. Like, everybody else is a decade behind,   like, if not more.  

And getting to hang out with him was incredible   because it enabled me to learn so much so quickly. And so this guy called me. He was like, hey. You're in Johan's WhatsApp group. I love what you're doing and trying to build.   He said, I my family has run a feedlot for a couple generations. I wanted to build a little grass genetics herd and do this, but it's just not working. I don't have time to be faithful to my family and my family's operations and do this on the side.   I've got this really good.   Do you want him? Like, I'd love to see him just actually put genetics into the world, and I think you're a good guy to go do this to build something that the industry needs. I was like, hell, yeah. I want him. And then the next day, he gets a phone call from some of the guys who are actually the original developers of this composite bull line and playing with some other bull genetics.   And they were like, hey. I'm selling the half brother of this bull and a few others. Do you know anybody who might want them? He's like, I think I might. So he called me. He's like, do you want them? I was like, hell yes. I want them.  

And so a lot of this stuff was some of these genetics developed by an early pioneer of regenerative grazing in The US.   I can't remember his name off the top of my head right now, but he had died a couple years ago. And most of his work got scattered out across the country. And just providentially with my phone ringing,   one after the other, I just had people offering me the best composite bulls in the nation to where I assembled this bull group of, like, 10 or 15 just world class composite bulls. And that timing is interesting too. Like, you wouldn't have been ready to receive them a year before.   Correct. And then, you know, now it's all the Lord saying, okay, you're ready now. Here it is. Yep. Because we got through that hard winter. I got to where I was better financial, like, had better financialization   to, like, actual treasury to go out and buy things.  

Oh, that was just beautiful. Once again, like, miracles take a lot of hard work, so you have to hold up in the space for them to arrive, but   I could not have done enough work to find these bulls. It was just purely   miraculous providence to have the right people reach out to me at the right time. And just being faithful to engage that by being engaged in the community of Johann's group and talking about it, just being open about trying to be faithful.   And then those provisions just arrived along the way through hope open the space through faithfulness. Right? Along the way, there's been tons and tons of challenges. I mean, just like the financial guys   dipping out when Bitcoin crashed with the character assassination,   we've discovered just how poor our generation is about the character to stay the course and keep their commitments.  



[01:15:50] Unknown:

John, you and I have had so many conversations about this. We have. Yep. And we talk about it a lot on Max, you know, you can go into a little bit more. We talk about it a lot in the mesh to del. Almost every episode. Mhmm. Yeah. How often do anybody stick to their word is an embarrassment, really. It's really, really sad. So when you do find people who can stick to their word and   do what they say, even if it's tough, you keep those people close because they're very, very rare. I'm thankful for it. We've all grown so much closer since when we first met. Max, you're a son to me. My my sweet little boy. Thanks, dad. Pinch your cheeks. I love you, dad. Ben and Joel's relationship has developed, you know, so much over the years. You and Ben's relationship, me and Sol X, me and all the Pleb Miner guys. It's fucking hard work is what he is.   Jesus Christ. He he's a lot. Yeah. I'd love to just be in the corner of Ben and Joel just having, like, a five hour long conversation. Could you imagine? What what's that like when you guys talk, Joel? I can't imagine.  



[01:16:53] Unknown:

Yeah. Wait. We definitely have some interesting conversations.   Oh, I bet. Because we're some of the few people facing these things in the real world who have the context to actually wrestle at problems together.   It's just most of my time and most conversations, I'm catching people up to understand the problem. And it's like 80% of the time it's explaining the problem. And 20% is introducing them to the solutions. Ben and I are the opposite direction  

[01:17:15] Unknown:

Mhmm. Because we understand the problem so instantly, we can just spend time dieting into how do we fucking solve this. We just gotta drop a mic in a room with those two Macs. Just have that be like an eight hour long episode. It probably would be. Yeah. No editing. Ben understands the problem so well because he just is one. He's a walking, talking problem,  

[01:17:34] Unknown:

and I'm gonna be seeing that weird come in about   three weeks. He's coming to visit for a long amount of time at my house, and I'm just preparing. I'll just keep a Oh, god. God bless you. Fuck you. Calm. I'm warning my family. Just just know this guy's coming, and he's fucking hard work. I love him, but he's hard work.  

[01:17:53] Unknown:

It's awesome.   So that's been our biggest challenge along the way. It's just broken commitments. I tell my core team what I'm vetting for in leaders who are running this project with me is people with the capacity for redemption.   Because leadership is service,   and what makes you suited for leadership is the capability to live from a posture of grace,   where you're taking ownership,   and you're not accusing when you get accused, you're not condemning when you get condemned.   You're capable of living where you're giving favor and mercy to others to redeem their failures or lack of character to create the opportunity for outcomes   that would not exist without you   doing the work to make it possible when everybody else is kind of shooting holes in the in the hole of the boat. Right? That has basically boiled down to we've built this whole operation   with three core guys including me,   and usually about one employee that's like a grazing intern or something along the way, which has been wild. Story after story behind that has just been challenging. Like the guy who invested in the agriculture company, we spun it off.  

We got here to the date he was committed to move, weekly and contractually, and he no showed.   And so like last fall, we scaled up by two twenty cows,   knowing we need to hit a certain scale to really get things all the way spinning for both the genetics program, the cash flows, and the ranch. We knew with the fourth guy coming, that was a fourth committed guy that we'd spent   over two years building relationship with. He had significant financial skin in the game   and legal commitment signed on that we're gonna drown ourselves this fall and winter, but at least in the spring, the fourth guy will get here. We could take some time off and breathe and recuperate.   And then he no showed.  

So, like, this is how it's been. Like, the same thing's true about even just general blue collar employees.   Whether you're talking plumbers or electricians or carpenters or restaurants, nobody has people anymore. Like, everybody's understaffed. Everything's chaotic.   That's true of just even basic supply chains and trying to buy anything because everybody's gutted. They're outside sales and administrative teams.   So it's like you have to do all the work just trying to order some fucking, like, hay feeder  

[01:20:00] Unknown:

because the company is not actually doing their job anymore. Here's the part where I would have done a Bifrost manufacturing   ad.   There you go, Bifrost. This could have been a great opportunity.  

[01:20:10] Unknown:

Yeah. You missed it, guys. Forget it. We still love you. Exactly. We do. So, like, the way I've come to describe it is that the spirit of our generation is relational nihilism post COVID. People break their word, and they're surprised   if you treat them as if you actually expected them to keep it. Fucking a god. Clip that, somebody. Yep.  

[01:20:32] Unknown:

That's a banger.  

[01:20:33] Unknown:

It's a generation of self righteous cowards   who have no understanding   of what it means to be a team player and function as a body. And like, I always try to talk about this idea of freedom, where people treat freedom as if it's freedom to never depend on anybody, but that's not true. Think about ourselves, like none of us can do everything. If you think about an actual physical body, like if your gift is to be a hand, my sage also says,   you know you're living in your true gifts and you're doing really huge things with very little effort. Right?   And so if that place is you being a hand,   true freedom is being a part of a body where you have somebody else who's a wrist, a forearm, an elbow, a humerus, and a shoulder so that you're free to get to be a hand. The problem is if you're trying to never depend on anybody,   you spend zero time being a hand because you spend all your time on the things you suck at because they take you longer to do. And so re understanding freedom requires being able to participate   on being a team player and also understanding that there's leadership and there's ways leadership works. And so, like, so much of this young generation,   they have this whole victim mindset because of this authority, power, and balance thing. The person who's lower in the chain of command can do no wrong. Anybody who's ever does anything wrong, it's always the guy who has more power. And so   the guys at the bottom just break their word, but they feel like they have this entitlement to do so because they're in victim mode. Preach. And you, who is the authority or the leader,   no matter what you do to try to actually create real commitments, to   create good expectations, to   develop, mentor, redeem,   they see you as the enemy.  

And so it's like we've got this generation of guys that have always been given a trophy but never been held accountable.   Now they're 20 or 30 year old men. Like, boys in men's bodies.   And Man. I get two weeks to develop enough social capital with them to tell them no for the first time because their dad never fucking did.   And it just doesn't work.   Like, I cannot build enough relationship to overcome   twenty or thirty years of orphan fatherlessness.   Even if they had a dad, the dad just never did anything. And so our biggest problem is we have this goose that laid the golden egg. Father's favor and provision for us, this magic   anointing network effect favor energy that's happening,   plus my, like, entrepreneurial skill and my ability just to create opportunities and magic outcomes.  

I'm constantly just watching value just trickle through my fingers, not even just trickle bleed through my fingers in a torrent   because I can't do everything, and I need people with me to execute on the opportunities I create. I want to interject here with the other two men that you have there are fucking machines.   Agreed.  

[01:23:18] Unknown:

Absolute   robots, just indomitable   spirit and work ethic   and energy and muscle   that sometimes it amazes me when I have conversations with one of them in particular,   you know, where he says, yeah, I've been working fourteen, sixteen hour days for   forty five, fifty days straight   and he's perfectly okay with it. He's like, yeah, I'm a little tired.  

[01:23:42] Unknown:

You know, he just keeps going. There's something special there. There's a spirit that's guiding them and giving them energy that shouldn't even exist. Well, with Daniel in particular, we've been buddies since 2010. We've done a lot of stuff in the world together. Been through the ringer in many different occasions.   What makes him special is he has this depth of heart to bring his full self to everything he does.   Oh, yeah. That's magic. Because so many of us,   we waste so much energy   on just not being present.   Existential fear,   pride, like all these different things, and they're all energy burns that weigh on us where we're not just in the flow state. And Daniel, what makes him magic is he has this heart ability just to choose to be fully there,   and nothing can steal it from him.  

And it just makes him absolutely relentless in the bandwidth of what he can do, like, hilariously.   Like a superpower.   Yeah. Like, we had two Mexican interns as a part of, like, a fifth year college program over the winter. It was just through some regenerative grazing connections where they wanted to come out here and be a part of the cutting edge grazing stuff we're doing. They tried to keep up with Daniel,   and they were working six days a week. And Daniel often is flexing into six and a half or seven days a week just as it's needed. And they weren't doing any of the leadership, any of the, like, really stressful intellectual stuff Daniel does. They were just trying to keep up purely as workers.   And those two guys made it, like, two and a half weeks before they just collapsed.  

He was doing more work and even just the physical work he was doing. He outworked two Mexicans.  

[01:25:16] Unknown:

Daniel was just a machine. I can attest to that. I lean heavily on my ability to do manual labor. I'm a horse in that sense. I'm not afraid to admit   it. And we had to take out two posts that you had concreted in, I think, on a corner post or something.   And, Daniel gives me a digging bar and a post hole digger, and I'm going at it and going at it, and he's doing the same thing on another one. I'm like, fuck. This fucking guy is lapping me. I don't like this at all.  

[01:25:43] Unknown:

Yep. Yep.  

[01:25:45] Unknown:

My other guy has been awesome too. By the way, Daniel's a lot younger than I am. I just wanna throw that out there. K? Mhmm. K, everybody. Most people are. Go ahead, Max. Go with your dig. Oh, I've got it in. How old are you, John? Old. I'm almost 50. Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, really? Is that old? Fuck off. Go ahead. Go ahead. Continue your conversation.  

[01:26:05] Unknown:

Okay. So we got a grandpa in the room. Sorry. I need to respect my elders a little better here. That's that's why Max is my boy. He's my son.   The sheer level of burnouts of guys who don't have the character. I always tell guys when I'm on board, I'm like, look. I need two things from you. I need you to be self honest. I need you to have grit.   If you bring those two, we can get through anything.   Like, one of our principles in the tribe of men here is this idea that as long as you bring full ownership, like mistakes and failures and things that actually have real costs are totally expected.   But as long as you own it with full honesty,   you're never alone.  

You've got brothers with you who will give you the grace and redeem it with you. And that's the trait. Like, grace is not costless.   The thing you need to meet in return to be worthy of grace is ownership. Right? And that ownership is just   dependent upon self honesty and grit to stay the course.   And once again, like, Daniel's just a king there. Like, what we've built would not exist without Daniel and my other core guy. The other core guy has been really interesting.   He was a young guy. His degree is in finance.   Super wicked smart,   like, math savant type guy. Like, he could be making millions in, like, investment banking or hedge fund world.  

But his core thing was, like, I refuse to be domesticated, and I wanna resurrect real citizenship   of a functional society again.   And so he joined my team before we even bought the property,   and I knew what this guy, this young guy, had it in to be. And so I kept putting weight on him. I was like, okay. I need you to go do this and lead.   Very intentionally   just kept putting more weight on him than he was capable of bearing. We've had this interesting phenomena here where it's everybody in the circle was people that are really high moral character   who desire to live inside of, like, an honor type culture and world.  

So I'm putting weight on him, putting weight on him, putting weight on him, and I just keep putting more on him than he can bear.   And one day, I sat him down. I was like, okay. We're at, like, month six.   You need to go to handle what I'm asking you to do as a leader. I'm like, why can you currently not? And he's like, man, I'm carrying an existential burden that I don't understand that's distracting me from being present, that I do what I need to do. And I'm like, okay. Great. This is why I'm a Christian. I carry   the freedom there of knowing who I am at an identity sense to where that's not a distraction for me because that's solidified between me and God. It's almost like that Rudyard Kipling poem, If, of the ability to not be distracted by either victory or defeat because you're not carrying any connection to, like, ego or identity. A lot of the guys in our circle have been guys like that who   had too much integrity to swallow, like, Christianity as a religion as has been previously preached to them. But when they see me or Daniel living with this energy of heart that's enabling us to live with this bandwidth of leadership and a bandwidth for redemption, just   being present while under extreme duress,   It makes them hungry of, like, where does this hope come from that's enabling the sheer amount of energy to change the reality around you guys? How do I participate in this? Right? So many people have tried to join our team. Like, even last winter, once the tech guy told me he was not gonna show up, I opened up this funnel of recruiting to, like, the regenerative agriculture world. And   we burned through, like, 15 fucking people from, like, September to, like, February until I finally just gave up on it. Yeah. Like  

[01:29:30] Unknown:

It's spending so much social and spiritual capital.  

[01:29:33] Unknown:

Oh, man. I mean, I probably personally or just a team, we probably put fifteen hundred man hours into recruiting, vetting, onboarding, training, and then dealing with picking up the pieces when guys washed out and failed.   And   there's so many threads of why they all failed, but it's that same thing. It's the self righteous cowardice. It's the lack of self honesty and grit. It always ties back to that.   So we eventually just kinda gave up on that, and we've been focused on   just more of, like,   a a deep and slow approach to mentoring.   Like, rather than me, like, trying to grow the team in a fast sense   by saying, like, I need people that are functioning at a level of, like, 80, and I'm gonna recruit people that are, like, forties or sixties on a 100 scale. I've just admitted to myself that the 40 60 type people don't exist. I need to start with the younger generation.  

And then   just start slower  

[01:30:28] Unknown:

with focusing really deeply on raising young people up from zero to the level where I need them to be. That makes me want to pivot this a little bit. You guys have this strong monastic brotherhood of three people.   How do you grow that and not just mentoring individual people to perhaps bring into that monastic brotherhood,   but the family element   to touch the younger generation? Will you need families in there? How are you doing that? How has that journey been?  

[01:30:56] Unknown:

That's been a big challenge.   We have some families in the local region that we're getting closer and closer with, which is awesome because they'll bring their kids by and just drop by all the time. And I miss that so much. I grew up in a fairly, like,   not like multi generational community in the sense of like a commune, but, athletic director at my high school was also a really good friend with my dad who was a big component of the local church or the men doing stuff together all the time. And it was just an awesome tribe of people. We'd go on vacation to White Lake, North Carolina every summer. We did that for almost, like, fifteen years.   Right the last summer, we took over a whole strip motel. It was, like, a 150 or 200 people. Like, just in the lake playing with the kids, going skiing and wakeboarding and playing King of the Tube, having, like, devotions and music out on the dock every night. I love that, just growing up with all the kids and the elders and all the people around.  

Building back to that in a gutted rural economy is hard because everybody's drowning in the economic problems, so nobody has time for relationships.   Yeah. So we have some friends which I'm leading into trying to cultivate these really solid families just being around as much as I can.   But I think at the same way, we're gonna have to just build that from zero with our own families inside the brotherhoods we're developing.   The way that's going with the deep and slow approach, like, I've got a young guy here.   I've actually started vetting people   for people that still have a sense of community.  

So guys that come from functioning families and still actually spend time engaged with their parents, guys that have real mentors in their lives who they submit to hearing their wisdom and advice and allow them themselves to be shaped.   Because these kind of emergent things where you're forerunning some change in the world,   it's typically   like your   high disagreeable   guys who don't quite fit in in the world who are doing this sort of stuff. And what goes with that is this kind of lone wolf phenomena, which I didn't appreciate the first couple years   how much the   guys who want to live in a different world are incapable of creating or even embodying the world they want to live in. Because if you bring this orphan lone wolf mentality, you never stay the course in relationship long enough   with humility and honesty   to be able to allow the unfolding to take place to where it actually starts to emerge. They just it gets hard. They quit. Right? And try to go find somewhere else that's just magically perfect with no work.  



[01:33:18] Unknown:

I I can imagine there's a lot of running into people who have bucked against the system for so long that once they realize that, well, this is kind of a system that you were involved in and you have to buy into the system. They're like, well, I've been nothing but a rebel, so that's all I know how to do.  

[01:33:33] Unknown:

Exactly. Exactly.   So, like, our current young guy who's Daniel's right hand man on the grazing operation side,   he just graduated college.   I got connected to him because his dad knows me just through the grazing world. He's a local rancher not far from here who runs South Pole cattle.   And so this young guy is still pretty well connected with his family, and he still values having   father figures and authority in his life to kinda develop him as a person.   So when he came on board, he had this sense of pride of not wanting to let his dad down with these relationships his dad respects.   And that has made everything different.  

And I'm really starting to look for that from here on out. It's like I want guys who bring that sort of a world with them. And so when we brought him on, I told him, like, look. I don't want employees anymore. I'm tired of dealing with fucking employees. Like, this just is not working.   If you're here, you're here. If you're in, you're in. You're gonna be salaried.   And we even designed his pay structure to kind of be a part of this emergent culture to where he's got a base pay,   and then he's got this daily bonus, basically.   It's not hourly. It's just kind of a daily salary.  

And every week, we give him a theme. The theme is both, like, practical in the work stuff, but it's also, like, heart and character   where I told him, like, look, like, he's committed here for a summer job. I'm hoping he'll become more of, like,   a actually in house mechanic type guy where I could pay for him to go do, like, tech school classes and things at night. But he committed to two months with me. I was like, okay. Look. In two months, it's not enough time to really make it worth me paying for tech school or anything like that where there's not gonna be much skill development.   But part of the deal, if you're here, you're here in a full identity sense of bringing your full self.  

So what my goal is is to send you away at the end of two months or keep you here at the end of two months, ideally,   where you're a better man in person because you've been here for two months. So if you don't wanna participate in mentoring, like, this isn't the place for you. He's just like, that's exactly what I want. I'm in. I want a place of purpose.   He was a pretty high level college athlete, and he was kinda missing that sense of camaraderie and brotherhood,   doing big things together. Right? Every week, we're debriefing his theme, and it's really interesting because I'll tell him, like, okay. Look. If you nail your theme, the typical standard is you'll get 80% of that bonus. And the bonus is 85%   of what his daily salary is. So it's a really big chunk compared to, like, his total pay volume.  

And so if he nails it, he gets 80% of it. If he, like, really goes above and beyond the call, I can get more than that. And every week thus far, we'll go through and just debrief the week, debrief his heart and how he did, and debrief kind of the mentoring and character stuff. Every week when he rates himself before I tell him when I've rated him, he's been within 5%   of what I thought he deserved of the bonus.   The only time we are further than that was a time that   Daniel was higher than him   because he had served one of the original big picture goals really well that week when we first hired him. And Daniel argued for him to be paid more money than he thought he deserved, which is just awesome. It's like Daniel's got this little tribe of guys that he's defending.   Mhmm. And so it's been this mechanism   that has facilitated   strong communication   of just keeping expectations aligned,   where it's cultivating energy being brought to the process in a way that's unique to how I've tried to do it before. And this is really working, John. This is something that it's going way better than it ever has before. I mean, partly Daniel's learning a lot about mentoring and development of guys, which has really helped. And I'm getting to teach him a lot about that. But the structure itself has been conducive to character growth in a way we've not achieved before either. That's interesting. I'd like to see that program developed and open sourced so other people can use it as well. It's nice now that you guys are are making money because it's not so much stick.  



[01:37:23] Unknown:

It's a little bit more carrot and a tangible carrot of money and to young men that really speaks to them.  

[01:37:30] Unknown:

But money has not fixed this problem. Like I've offered really lucrative pay rates   that hasn't really changed things with recruiting from like the mainstream ag world,   because money is not really the issue. It's just the ability to be a part of a team and do big things in the world requires a level of character that you possess.   And develop character   requires   caring about that, and few people do.   Fast forward to where we are today. Right? With basically three guys,   we've overcome   I mean, the first year, there was a drought. Bitcoin crashed from sixty nine thousand to 15,000.   We've had all the challenges facing, like, the collapse of agriculture's industry in The US,   And we've scaled from being people that knew nothing about grazing to being nationally and internationally recognized as leaders in ultra high density grazing. We've run an ultra high density grazing Facebook group that is educating American ranchers about this. Like we're getting invited to speak on working cows or acres USA, or I got another one with Cal. I forget the name of this podcast, grazing grass community coming up on next Monday. And I'm gonna be speaking at some conferences this summer. And there's this whole thing where we've talked about in the Bitcoin community.  

You can just do things.   Part of the beauty of Bitcoin with it being the Uno reverse card credit creation,   our whole world is super financialized and nothing's creating real value anymore.   It's like everything is either like a fucking vaporware meme coin   or it's like Uber or Twitter that's cannibalizing an industry and digitizing it, but never actually profitable.   Or it's like a bank, like Apple making money on Apple Pay rather than their products or, like,   fucking grocery stores   making their money on their payment terms of, like, you buy groceries and pay them now. They don't pay their suppliers for net, like, 90 or $1.80, and they invest the money and that's where the revenue comes from. Right? Everything is just fucking financialized.   Overcoming that in the real economy   to where   we're creating value   of the forms of capital that are not financial value requires, one, people that care about this idea of cathedral building and restoration   of our society and productive capacity.  

But it also requires us to be productive people who are actually living as citizens   with a mind of citizens. Because so much of our current generation has this idea of, well, everybody's stupid, nonproductive,   and lazy now, so my kids are gonna get rich because they're gonna just outwork and outcompete everybody. Like, buddy, it doesn't work that way.   You're on a ship of a society and you share that ship together.   And if you're in a society where everybody's blowing holes and the hole would sink in your boat, you're gonna sink with it. You have to think as if you've taken responsibility   for the trajectory of your society itself and live as a citizen to shape where that's going and take responsibility and ownership over it. What we're doing here   has   shown that with us as Bitcoiners, with the freedom that comes through Bitcoin being able to bring energy in my direction where I'm not trapped thinking in a purely financial mindset anymore,   we've been able to, in four years,   go from   completely nothing to being leaders in one of the keystone industries in the nation.  

And that's wild. Like, I always tell people it's a three legged stool.   True expertise and deep knowledge is actual heart of truly loving what you're doing and people being on a sense of that, and then it's scale. Part of what this idea with this Bitcoin mesh to Dell idea is   is creating a world again where we're behaving   with the skill and ability to work together   to tackle real problems in the world because we care about real value, not just number go up, right, on, like, your bank account of investing in tech stocks or whatever bullshit.   Mhmm. When you've got people that are willing to see value in all the forms of capital and play long time horizon games,   chaos is opportunity.  

I mean, it enables you like, you think about it this way,   with the elites and the parasites and whatever you wanna call this world we're living in, or even just a dysfunctional   economy,   that whole world,   business functions based upon trust. Trust is like the oil in the gears that keeps the engine turning. As society gets more and more selfish, more and more scared of the future, more and more hopeless,   their ability to create value through working together just   craters. I mean, whether you're talking about, like, people not following through because, like, I ordered something and they ship it to me broken, or, like, the implicit ways of business, like, somebody who's a founder in a company having   VC guys tell them they're interested in investing than just wasting their time trying to use the founder's expertise to learn about the tech world, but never actually intending to invest in. It's like we live in a society with   implicit   culture and the way things used to work that's now just being taken advantage of by people just trying to get their own. Right? Because of that,   most of the economy out there is so selfishness driven   that everybody's having to try to protect themselves from each other.  

If you build a tribe of people who only have to try to outmaneuver the external world and there's actually functional rapid value flow internal to the tribe of people because trust is working to where you're not having to try to protect yourself from the guy next to you as well as the enemies outside,   your capacity for out competing everybody really goes up. Mhmm. But the key there is,   as the world collapses, it fractures and atomizes to smaller to smaller levels of scale.   And the herd share is a really good example of what's possible   when you unite people through creating a high honor and trust culture   to create scale, because now   you can out compete the world at large,   where you're able to bring an effectiveness that nobody else has,   and not only are we creating a renaissance   through the energy of Bitcoin reversing credit creation for the Bitcoin holders,   but we're leveraging this long term mindset of honor and character   to actually create real value in the world through just productive capabilities   that in itself is allowing us to outrun everybody else and climb the ladder of chaos. And the way the elites try to use   fear and chaos as a weapon to get more control, we're using it to spark the renaissance. Right?  



[01:43:56] Unknown:

We've done a great job of covering almost all the eight forms of capital in this. To wrap things up. Joel, I'd like to talk about your living capital, how the cows have changed, how you've changed the soil there, how the grass is growing. One thing we didn't touch on very much in this conversation is material capital.   And I know that we're probably not gonna have time to touch on it very much that the Bitcoin mining is an interest of yours,   that you have Bitcoin mining capacity   at the that the farm   that you and I, and you've tried to spin up projects where you are doing Bitcoin mining off of solar,   where you're going to heat capture into greenhouses   and and heating water.  

And a source that we like to use on Ungovernable Misfits is our friend, Altair Tech, where where you can get all of your mining gear.   Altotech.io   has all of the mining gear that you need for your farm, for your home,   for your natural gas well, for your on grid site.   Joel, I know that you have a few miners there and that they are in upstream data containers and they kind of just run all the time and something you and I have spoken a lot about   is heat capture. That's a waste product that can definitely be used and alter tech. Io has a number of different items that you can use for heat capture. Perhaps as you start to bring families on board and have them set up in tiny homes or trailers.   If it's a trailer, you're probably going to be using, you know, like two sides of 110. Altertech.io   has a number of different offerings from the Canon line of products, the Bitchimney, the Loki rig stuff that all work on 110   that are intended to use heat capture. Altertech.io   is where all of the Ungovernable Misfits go to source their gear, to source accessories, to source Loki rigs, and large orders of minors.  

He has them all on-site in Missouri. This is an American company. All of the duties are already paid. What you pay is what you pay. He's taken care of all of the shipping   tariff fluctuations,   and such China deals. He's got that all taken care of. You know exactly what you're going to pay. Joel, to wrap things up, how has the farm changed?   How have the genetics of the cows changed going from Virginia on sandy soil next to   a horse farm where you have these piney woods, these   zombie apocalypse cattle, to moving to Oklahoma,   changing the nature of the soil there, bringing back the life in the soil, the the nematodes,   the the mycelium,  

[01:46:38] Unknown:

building that up through high density management intensive grazing. What does your soil look like? Your grass, your cow genetics. How has that changed? Great question. Long term, one of our goals is to build like a regenerative agriculture country club. People love country clubs because you have this connectivity and this network effect that opens opportunity for people's lives.   Back to the idea again of, like, trust is the product that enables scaling opportunity in the world. A part of that is I want really healthy housing because healthy people are a keystone of a healthy way functioning society because society's made up of people.   And so much of modern buildings are just   full of mold, they off gas VOCs.  

I really wanna get into   solar architect designs of, like, buildings built around healthy solar light environments and built with natural materials. And one of my early ideas I wanna build   is, like, a shared workspace where it's almost, like, dormitory style living environment with, like, just some shared areas. Like, almost like a WeWork, but with housing tied to it. So say, like, you got young guys who wanna do these tech startups,   and it could just be a place where you can show up and grind. You have healthy food that's already there taken care of for you, have healthy housing,   and you have this cross pollination ability of these guys having common areas where they can spend time together brainstorming and working on things. And having, like, heat capture   and all that could be such a huge part of having these thermal mass style structures that are just super ideal for human comfort and just biohacking type thing for maximizing executive performance in startup entrepreneur worlds. That really ties into the ranch itself of what we're working on next. So genetics, ecology, ultra high density grazing. So I would define regenerative agriculture   as the maximization   of photosynthetic energy capture   while balancing the stocks of ecological capital for resilience and future productivity   with the flows of production capital of   food for going into the marketplace immediately. What makes our grazing system ultra density magic   is that it is the only way to truly drive   both of those to their maximum ability.  

I mean, you're driving succession to species, root exudates at deep carbon stores of stable carbon built in the soil like humates,   and you're maximizing   efficiency of carry capacity, a number of animals that can be living on a property, which is the total size volume of the productive engine, right, of what's   out there grazing that is the flow of meat to the market for funding yourself. Right?   But the problem in the ultra high density grazing world is a couple different pieces.   One, you need scale.   Jaime Elizondo says that the economically viable scale for a cow calf operation in The US is 500 head. And like we were talking about earlier, 89% of the ranches in The US are less than a 100 cows. Average herd size of that tranche is 22 animals.   So we're nowhere near that for the bulk of American ranches. The other problems there are gonna be like the genetics problem. A lot of people are talking about these low input grass genetics   of, like, South Pole or Ferro heat tolerant Incas composites.  

We've trialed all that here and they did horrible.   The difference between a light rotational system like Greg Judy style, where you take half, leave half of the grass,   and ultra density grazing style where you're pushing the animals in a really tightly packed mob and utilizing this in all of the forage, just leaving a little stubble behind,   is a vastly different animal.   But the magnitude of difference between like a commercial cow and like a South Pole or a Faro Angus is a pretty big difference.   The kind of cattle we need for this grazing system is almost the same magnitude of difference again. There's reasons behind that where, like, basically,   Johan says a cow has a dual purpose.  

She's the keystone species for ecological management and the productive flow of meat for the marketplace.   And so the genetic   suitedness and adaption of the cow is the strength of the lever arm that you can use for fancying the ecology of the land and healing the land itself. The more pressure you can put on the cow, the faster you can heal the land.   And so with the high density management, there's a lot of knock on effects of why that's better for the land, which I won't get into now. You can listen to my agriculture focused podcast. You wanna know more about that.   But basically, we need a cow that's capable of handling a lot more pressure than most modern animals to return to the grazing principles of how the wild ruminants used to graze these giant herds of bison,   migrating with the seasons grazing intensively or non selectively, and it looking like nothing left after they went through because that's the symbiosis of how prairie grasslands and grazing animals actually work together.  

The problem with trying to implement   these really high speed, highly efficient grazing systems,   which maximize productive capabilities   and stock to flows. So you're maximizing photosynthetic energy capture and just productive volume   of soil fertility being built and of animal flow of beef,   is that the skill and genetics needed to implement that system just currently doesn't really exist.   Part way that's because the cost of owning land with land being monetized and stored value,   the monetary premium is just like gold where gold's not used for a lot of industrial purposes like electronics because   it's worth so much as an investment asset being held in a vault. It outcompetes as productive uses. The same is true of land and agriculture.  

With those phenomenas,   you have the need for these ranchers to be able to carry a lot of cattle in order to better cover those costs without the genetics or skills when you're flying this fast, you tend to have a very small margin of error. So like a lot of guys, like Michael Kinsey, Reverend Wild Ranch is one of the leading ranches in the country. He's over in Georgia, just a little south of Chattanooga, Tennessee.   He started his herd with a 130   kind of South Pole Angus type cows.   Guess how many cows survived his choline and his genetics program at the end of the first six years, John? I'm gonna 30%.   Two. Not 2%. Oh my god. Two animals. Right? Okay. So the genetics piece is key. That's part of why I'm in Oklahoma because Oklahoma is terrible.  

Like, it's weathered the worst of all extremes, toxic fescue.   If I can have these animals doing well here, they can thrive anywhere in the country, so we could build the genetics resources for anybody to use. Mhmm. But there's this kinda multi leg stool.   Better genetics give you more margin of error because the cow's actually like a better lever arm.   But there's also the skill component where you need to really know what you're doing to better fly fast.   And that includes being able to read the ruins of the animals, the utilization of the grasses, the body condition of the animals, and to do so, recognize trends and relationships between trends really quickly.   And so most people who are trying to do this end up failing because the pace you're required to learn to be successful is faster than people are capable of failing forward and surviving economically.  

That or a lot of the leading ultra density ranches in The US. Like, as of a year ago, I knew six, and two of them lost their land. I ended up buying the bulk of the herds from both of them, which is beautiful that I was able to protect their work, but I hate seeing guys go underwater. They were on leased land because they couldn't afford to actually own the land, and then they got rug pulled.   So what we're working on is kinda building this multi leg tool to catalyze change in the industry at scale.   So we're kinda going towards this, like, techno habitry thing where I'm working with an AI company,   and we're developing   grazing technologies   for high frequency grazing management.  

Stuff that's gonna be able to measure animal room and fill, pasture utilization, and volume versus bricks levels, and animal body condition trends, the interrelationships   between the two, and stack a bunch of, like, data outcomes   that show you as a grazing manager really quickly,   like, what the trends are so you could be creative and make really good decisions.   When we put all this together with our model, we've got this financial model, the new way to approach community based farming with herd shares.   We're going to build a system for community land ownership. That's another kind of liquid instrument that enables scaling land and middle class access to land investments.  

Then we've got   the actual   genetics base that we're building to be the other tool. And then we're working on building not just education programs, but technology   stacks   that enable these guys to   be able to learn fast with lower failure rates. But it also, like, tools shape your world view of how you approach solving problems because they shape how you think. Like, you don't try to use a hammer to twist something. You don't try to use a screwdriver to hit something. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Come on. You you can totally use a screwdriver to hit something.   Not effectively for very long. She'll break it.  

And so having good tooling with these technologies is gonna make people ask the right questions, which will make them learn.   Rather than having to have these really long term internships to teach people, we can give them the stack that's like a wiki of the knowledge with the tools. The tools will protect and shepherd them so they don't make catastrophic mistakes. Right?   And so when we stack all this together,   we're gonna forerun building all these pieces to enable   the industry at scale in The US to change through   having this full system scope solution package prepared for them. I love how you're building in technology  

[01:56:03] Unknown:

and all of that into what you're doing. It reminds me every conversation I have with Ben is similar, just trying to find ways to bring tech in and make things more efficient. And I don't know if that comes from, like, the Bitcoin aside or where it comes from, but it seems like there's a lot that could be done with making these things more efficient and easier to pass the knowledge on quicker. Exactly. I mean, I originally started looking harder at this, like, with, like, GPS fence collars instead of physical fencing, and this AI software, high frequency data stack and all this.  

[01:56:36] Unknown:

Because just the labor stuff's eating me alive, like, I wanted to employ a lot of people to create this local economic energy to restore, like, rural economies.   But without having enough people   to actually build with me, it's forced me to think differently.  

[01:56:52] Unknown:

And dealing with people and employing people is generally a fucking pain in the ass. So if you can have a bit of technology,   which you can   technically employ to do the same thing,   you don't have to manage that in the same way. It doesn't have sick days.   You don't have all the same issues that you would probably have with most employees, and that then clears your mind to do other more important things because everyone I speak to who has many employees like most of their gripes are fucking hell I can't get the work,   they're lazy like you were saying or they don't take ownership or they're lying or they're stealing or they're not turning up or   whatever the problem is. If you have either machines or tech doing the work, you can save yourself a lot of time and energy. The goal being leveraging tech to put people in a position that's where the people should be, like, creating value,  

[01:57:44] Unknown:

to where they're ruling and creating as creative critical thinkers   rather than just punching the clock doing real labor. Right? What that's enabling of us going towards infrastructure and tech   is allowing us the space and the freedom   to focus on deep mentorship of raising super high quality people who could participate in that process as citizen leaders with us,  

[01:58:07] Unknown:

rather than waste our so much of our energy on low quality people who the investment's not returning on effort because they're just not really growing into productive human beings of us. Ma'am, two hours and fifteen minutes. Hate to be the bad guy. We're gonna cut it off here. We've barely scratched the surface with you, but I think people have an understanding that   you really did go from pleb to pioneer.   And you're true to your word.   Everything you've said and done has been for the betterment of humankind, and it's been done with a positive spirit   and a work ethic.  

And just watching two guys, for instance, somebody else we've mentioned a lot in this podcast, Ben Gunn   and you just sometimes I'm in awe of you guys. Glad to know you. Thanks a lot, Joel, for coming on and always being a positive member of the mesh to Dell. You often   rub people the wrong way, and I think that's because they see their own failings when you shine a mirror up to them or you challenge their assumptions   about themselves and what they're doing. But don't stop doing that. Don't ever stop doing what you're doing, and and I don't think it doesn't even matter what I say. You'll you'll never stop.  

[01:59:13] Unknown:

That's true. It's true. Yeah. Because I feel super privileged to have the opportunity to do what I'm doing. Like, I'm so grateful.   Like, I often think about the Psalm from David where he says, the wines have fallen to me in pleasant places. I have been given a good inheritance.   The miraculous provision and support from   so many people has set me free to better go do this and figure these things out in the world, Not just to forerun an industry, but to actually figure out how to build the tools to change it at scale.   Mhmm. Part of that too has been, I've been given the gift in my life of really good father figures and mentors.  

And so few people in our world love each other enough to say the truth that invades and disrupts us   to, like, iron sharpen iron to give us the opportunity to stand up like men and grow. Right?   And, like, I I always say this kind of funny what it means. Like,   iron sharp and iron doesn't work if everybody behaves like a limp noodle because now you're just smooshing against each other.   And it's kind of what's in my heart is to pay that back for the men who have done that for me in my life. Because I'm a hard ass revolutionary type disagreeable person,   and I've tried to be the best student I can be for those types of guys who I've had in my life. But at the same time, like, I   it takes some some grit to be a guy who's teaching me something.  

And, my mentor, I don't know if you've met Tim or not, John, but I haven't. I've heard so much about him from you and Daniel that I almost feel like I know him. You would love him so much. I need to introduce him to him one day.   I see that as a duty where it's not even for the people I'm trying to love by trying to shine the light of speaking the thing that I believe people need to hear to have the friction to learn things. It's not even about loving them. It is about loving them. But it's also just   I feel that as a way to honor the men who did that for me by giving that opportunity to other people that I run into in whatever circles I'm living and engaged in. And I find it all a privilege because it's just it's all a part of the gratitude, and I'm so grateful to have been given that myself.  



[02:01:14] Unknown:

Well, I'm grateful for you. I know Max is as well, and I know the rest of the mesh is grateful to have you be such an important part of it. Thanks, Joel,   for updating everyone on what's going on at Smoke River Ranch, and we'll definitely talk again later. Yeah. Thanks.  

[02:01:29] Unknown:

Much appreciate it, guys. Thanks for having me on. Sure thing.  

[02:01:36] Unknown:

Wow.   That was a hell of an interview. Max and I always say this. It could have gone on for another Oh, yeah. Two, three hours.   Yeah.  

[02:01:44] Unknown:

Easy. We have to do it again. Like you say, we just sort of scratched the surface, but I do think it gave a really good overview for people who wanted to catch up with what you're doing. I think we did a good job there. Agreed.  

[02:01:56] Unknown:

Agreed.   I'd love to, as I get the tech stack, to build their own actual product, hop back on and actually talk about   the hows of the grazing science, why the tech stack is important.   The whole system, but the tech stack actually feels good. Because I think the VintCoeters with this kind of over culture love, the the production soil, the pitch with the tech's artistic mindset,  

[02:02:18] Unknown:

I think it'll really write off when these guys are excited about them. Once they get it and see it, but It's a promise that you made everybody a long time ago, so you're gonna open source a lot of new systems for them. Yep. And it's so much more than here's my open source management intensive craziness system where there are a lot of fucking paper.  

[02:02:36] Unknown:

Yeah. Because I've just learned without the tools that I've got to go that fast to make this work and then you can put some crazy stuff where there are a lot of thinking. Yeah. Because I've just learned without the tools that I've been pushing for. Is the time Let's just waste my time and focus. Supposed to live through. And their money. Yeah. It's just it's it's challenging. It's like flying a fighter jet because you need to go that fast to make this work and then this work and make it harder.   We won't argue that good if you're reliable, but if I can give them a fly by wire system where it doesn't take that much skill, then it unlocks a whole new world of zero to one that didn't previously exist.   Right. That's it for us. I appreciate it, you guys. Thank you, Joel. This is great. Yeah. We'll speak soon, mate. We'll take care. To bring you down. Those jealous motherfuckers,   they will try and take your crown.