Barn Talk - Bitcoin, Farming, and Legacy: Insights from Vance Crowe

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Welcome to Barn Talk! In this one, we dive into a great conversation with Vance Crowe, a visionary in the fields of bitcoin, farming, and legacy preservation. In this episode, we'll explore the revolutionary idea of utilizing blockchain for fair voting systems, the benefits of saving in Bitcoin, and the exciting prospects of the Lightning Network for faster transactions. Vance also opens up about his personal quest to balance career success with family life, offering invaluable insights into parenting and the importance of recording family stories for future generations. Use code BARNTALK for 10% OFF your next order https://farmergrade.com SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ➱ https://bit.ly/3a7r3nR   SUBSCRIBE TO THIS’LL DO FARM ➱ https://bit.ly/2X8g45c  SUBSCRIBE TO BARN TALK CLIPS ➱ https://bit.ly/3BlZnqq   LISTEN ON: SPOTIFY ➱ https://open.spotify.com/show/3icVr4KWq4eUDl7Oy60YMY  ITUNES ➱ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/barn-talk/id1574395049 Follow Behind The Scenes👇🏻 ● This’ll Do Farm Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/30KPBNk   ● Barn Talk TikTok ➱ https://bit.ly/3qciekS   ● Sawyer’s Instagram  ➱ https://bit.ly/3BtX0n4   ● Tork’s Instagram ➱ https://bit.ly/3LGZJxS    00:00 Founder of Legacy Interviews records life stories. 06:57 Company lost due to misguided PR strategy. 15:14 Spreading truth, building trust through podcasts. 16:12 Unexpected interview with an eager six-year-old fan. 25:02 Family history lost over generations, a fading heritage. 27:28 Parents share stories, sparking unexpected memories. 33:20 Family name reflects values passed down. Prepare the next generation for a chaotic world. 43:12 Understanding family history shapes identity and perspective. 47:02 The struggle of balancing work and parenting. 50:47 Parenting is tough but everyone struggles too. 55:00 Struggle to balance future, wealth, and family. 01:01:59 Curiosity about Bitcoin's fluctuating popularity cycle. 01:06:49 Bitcoin ATM popular for fast, cheap transfers. 01:12:36 Bitcoin's scarcity secures its value and stability. 01:16:23 Bitcoin's open-source nature, code's constant updating. 01:24:41 "Institutional investment to boost the popularity of Bitcoin." 01:28:23 Bitcoin allows signing messages, attaching value, and preventing spam. 01:33:26 Bitcoin hardware card allows offline transactions. 01:38:53 Banks play a potential role in protecting assets. 01:44:32 Traditional economics is biased, but Bitcoin changes everything. 01:47:07 Speaking engagements on farm management and innovative practices. ------------------------------- ⚠NO FINANCIAL ADVICE / DISCLAIMER⚠  The Information discussed and shared on Barn Talk is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or success for any particular purpose. The Information contained in or provided from or through this podcast is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice. The Information on this podcast and provided from or through our content is general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented on this podcast without undertaking independen... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's the Family and Friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, April 28th and Wednesday, April 29th. Open your PC Optimum app to get your coupon. All of the food we eat and much of the clothing we wear comes from plants and animals that are raised on farms. Farms are different in type, in size, and even in name. Welcome to Barn Talk.

What happens at the barn? Stayes in the barn, but not today. We're going to let it all out for you guys. is going to be a guest episode. Got a awesome guest coming on the show to talk legacy and other things. Came all the way from St. Louis to southeast Iowa to make it happen. But before we get into it, you guys know the drill. If you get any value from the show, share it with the people that you know. The more that you guys do that, the more that this show grows, more people we can reach, the more episodes we can make, the more guests we can get on. It's a win-win for everybody.

So if you learn something, laughed at something, related to us on something, just all we ask is you share it. It's kind of the ticket to admission to watch or listen to the show. Something else that you can do to help us out here at Barn Talk is leave a review on Spotify or Apple. The more that you guys do that, the more the show gets credible. It gives our show mad credibility. You know, that's probably the number one metric that people look at when they look at podcast success is their reviews. So please keep letting us know your feedback doing those reviews.

were almost a 3,000 5-star reviews on Spotify and almost to 2,000 5-star reviews on Apple. We appreciate you guys doing that. Last thing you can do to help support Barn Talk is you can support our directed consumer meat business. We partner with the most well-known livestock farmers in America, Farmergrade, Farmergrade.com. We got American Wagyu, dry-age beef, pork that we raise on our farm, pasture-raised chicken, and we got a new reward system that we have rolled out that will give you points on the orders that you put in and you can get money off your orders. And then we also just got some new pork cuts in that are pretty unique. We got a pork porterhouse. We got some jowl bacon, some pork

brisket, which is pork brisket. Pork brisket. I know, right? I'm going to have some of that. It's going to be pretty bomb. Pretty bomb. So just wanted to throw that out there for you guys to know. We also got some other stuff, bacon, pork chops, whatever. You name it. Got all the stuff you need. You know, I like this reward system because basically it's, it's kind of like a, it's, it's kind of like having can deposit on bush light. Yep. You can practically make money drinking. It's like a credit card.

You can make money eating pork brisket. Yep, that's right. That's amazing. America's an amazing place. It is an amazing place. And, you know, you're talking about the podcast, about credibility. And, you know, for a long time, I thought it was just okay. It was enough for us to just, me specifically to look incredible.

Yep. But look incredible. You look good today. It won't get you there. You got to be credible. That's right. we try our best we do try our best

I do the most of the heavy lifting on the good looking side I'd say you do actually I'll give that to you you're the most curious looking though I am curious sometimes people think you're a circus midget the other time they think troll that's guys off Lord of the Rings

oh yeah yeah that's right yeah he's gone down on my list do you see he was at the DNC doesn't surprise me Frodo who's who's your who's your look alike on there It's not Frodo, it's his sidekick. Yeah, I don't know what his name is.

But he was at the DNC. Yeah, he's a DNC. Obviously, he didn't take the ring off. He's, he's, he's the dark side. He's one with the, yeah. He's a minion of Sauron. So anyway, I digress. So I'm really excited for today's episode.

You guys know we talk about this a lot. We talk about legacy. We talk about, you know, what are you doing all this for? And our guest today, he, has really, he's kind of made a business. No, he has made a business. His business is letting families tell their story, tell their legacy story. And it's, you know, he's learned a lot and hopefully he can share some insights into the lessons that he's learned from interviewing hundreds of families since he started it. He also does a podcast. He does a lot of speaking. Great guy.

and also a little bit of a Bitcoin bug. So we might get into that a little bit too. But really looking forward to it. And so without any further ado, let's get into it. Vance Crowe, welcome to Barn Talk. Hey, man, glad to be here. You like that? We just slide it in there. That was fast. That was fast. Yeah. We'll make it all sound good sometime down the road. We'll come back to it. Yeah. Well, thanks for making the trip. We appreciate you making it away all the way down to Southeast Iowa. For people that don't know who you are and what you're up to, give them just a brief description of what you're up to today and kind of what Vance Crow does. I am the founder of a company called Legacy Interviews, where I record individuals and couples telling their life stories

so that future generations have an opportunity to know where they came from. Before I did that, I was actually the director of millennial engagement for Monsano. So, you know, there are a lot of people that have strong feelings about GMOs and pesticides. Well, my job was to go out and talk with them. And I was kind of uniquely suited for that position because while I'd grown up in rural America, I bailed hay, I walked beans. But I lived in town. When I went away to college, I definitely had the same perception that most of the urban environment does, which is big ag is terrible. They're tricking us. There are things hidden here. And so ultimately taking that job, I ended up being some somebody that was converted over to like, hey, wait a second, there's a lot of good things that have

happened with modern ag. And the people in the city, they don't want to be afraid. Somebody's made them feel that way. So what do we need to do to change culture? And so that's kind of what led me to the ag world, which is who is most of the legacy interview guests. I would say something like 65 to 70% of the people that hire me to record their stories are people in ag.

So the two have just kind of gone hand in hand. What were some of the things that you did to like combat that? Like what are some of the tasks that you did for Monsanto to kind of help push their message or, you know, Well, when I took the position, Monsanto like had finally come to the realization like, oh crap, even though we only sell stuff to farmers, people in the city, even though they don't buy from us, if we don't reach out to them, we have a big problem. But it took them like decades to get there. So they then did what you would imagine everybody would do.

It's like real standard. You hire a PR firm, you start running ads, you know, run sponsor conferences. But then they also, Monsanto was an incredibly innovative company. It's a national tragedy that we lost that company. Because when the other thing they did was they said, well, we're going to do the standard thing, but we're also going to spin out something different. So they said the PR company has done all this research and they say the people driving the bad narrative about modern ag are moms, millennials, and food-minded people.

So let's hire somebody that's specific to each one of these. groups to figure out how can we relate to him. So I get hired for this job and it's a funny story how I got hired but we'll skip that. And then in this job, I went to the PR firm kind of thought they were going to run the show. So they came to me and they're like, hey, you have about X millions of dollars allocated to your budget and we have brought forward you a bunch of conferences. Well, there'll be college kids and different environmental groups and you can choose which one you want to sponsor, a couple of them. And then you'll get about five minutes on the stage with them. And I thought, this is a terrible strategy, right? Like,

if the world views you as North Korea, it doesn't matter how many billboards you put up saying, look at how beautiful the beaches are. Like, nobody wants to hear that. And so I kind of tried to invert it and basically said, you guys take all of that money back. What I'm going to do is I'm going to offer that I'll go to speak with any critic group, any college group. If they'll buy my plane ticket to come visit them, then I'll come tell you anything you want to know that I've learned. And I don't have a horse in this race. I'm not a geneticist. I'm not a farmer. I didn't make the biotech. If you know something that I don't know, then I'll take that question back and find out the real answer because ultimately my job was, was like, I don't care about Monsanto. Like, this is really

the thing that it was for me was the greatest communications problem, maybe in the history of modern civilization. And I was always a communications person. Like there are a lot of people they go to college. They don't know what to study, so they study communications. I was a person that was like, I love finding out how to talk with people, how to engage, how to interact. And so the Monsanto job was literally the best communications job I could get. So to answer your question more directly, I started going to activist groups. I started saying, hey, let's do things like a Reddit AMA before these things were popular. And instead of using an executive that was really polished with the PR people, I found a geneticist that was like the old grumpy guy that

corrects everything you say, taught him how to use Reddit, and then we did an AMA. And it was the second highest rated science AMA in the history of Reddit, second only to Stephen Hawking. And once we did that, I had actually acquired more viewership than the PR firm's Super Bowl ad. And this one had cost me and another guy some time. And this one had cost millions of dollars. So all of a sudden Monsanto was like, hey, this is what we like. We did some innovation. Now you can, and run around and do things. And so from there, we did spend about five years doing some pretty creative things. That's awesome. That's really cool. You live in St. Louis now, right? I do. Yeah. Do you still feel like, just in your experience in the city, do you still feel like that narrative of

big ag is still a negative? People have a negative connotation of big ag, still with just the people you interact with on a day to day? I think that it comes in waves, and a big part of the reason it comes in waves is that there has to be money pumping this idea into the public consciousness. And really, I think, like, when I did the research of how is it that everybody just knows big ag is bad, what you come to find out is there are people that they could benefit by saying that's the bad way of doing it. This is the good way. And we hate all the bad way.

So people, they don't have enough time to understand the reality of the world around them. We don't have that time. have to tell yourself stories. The only people telling stories were the people that were saying, don't buy that product, buy the one that's non-GMO because this one's going to make you healthy. You can still eat 50 bowls of cereal a day and not be fat because ours is non-GMO. So when the activists figured out that it was going to be really hard for them to extract money out of the GMO fight, they went towards glyphosate. And the chemistry fight is way, way more complicated story-wise to tell people. They started winning billion.

of dollars and you notice all that talk about GMOs went away. And at the same time, you had this kind of cultural shift where you went from the right being really supportive of farmers and this is a good thing to the left saying trust the science. So we had a simultaneous culture flip that all of a sudden now all the people on the left are GMOs are okay. But what about those pesticides? I don't know about that. And so what I hear right now is a lot of people, really worried about their health based on what chemicals are going on. But there's not the vitriol around Monsano or Bear, as there was, but it's coming back. I just saw, you know, two people on Tucker Carlson, the largest podcast on Spotify, talking about the dangers of big ag. So it's coming back

is just going to come in a different variation. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? And Joe Rogan, I mean, Joe Rogan's kind of the same way. I mean, he's, he's anti big ag because that's what he's been spoon fed over and over and over and over. And he just, you know, they don't have another perspective, you know. And there's not, big ag is not perfect. You know, there's flaws in any system out there. But there's a medium to every truth out there. And usually involves money. Yeah. And that's the truth. It does. 100%. It's always follow the money. So, so. So I just thought that was interesting. Hey, thanks for staking with us. In 2023, beef and pork exports and accounted to 84.3.3 million bushels of Iowa corn usage, creating a return on investment of nearly $174.87 per Iowa corn acre.

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Now let's get back to it. I'm just curious because I don't know if I ever asked you this or not. So what was the catalyst to you start in legacy? Like what's that window from Monsanto to what you're doing now? So when I, when Bear bought Monsano, I had a mentor and he, he said, stay there for a year. I was like, look, I'm here. I was here to do this thing. It was the best communications job in the world. I don't really want to do it anymore. He said, stay for a year. So I did. And Bear was fine. They were just a large corporation. They're a huge bureaucracy, very complicated thing. And after a few months, they came to me and said, look, we're not going to keep going with the director of millennial engagement. But we have loved the work you've done.

So we'd like to put you on the executive track. Would you like to go into supply chain or finance? And I was like, I don't want either one of those things. I really don't want it. And so I resisted and resisted and resisted. And they eventually were like, look, you can even leave and we'll give you a great severance package. But you have to apply for one of these jobs. And then if you don't get it, we can give you a severance package. And I was like, well, if I take that severance package, what do I have to sign for that?

And they're like, not much. You just have to sign like a non-d disparagement agreement that you'll never talk badly about us. And I was like, well, I want to be able to leave and be able to say whatever I want. And I was getting a lot of requests at the time to come to ag groups and say, what have you learned about talking with activists? What have you learned about conflict and negotiations? And I never wanted to be able to stand up there and have somebody ask me a question and have everybody in the room wonder.

Is he telling the truth? Even being on this podcast right now. Like how much is it worth to you to be able to say like, if I say something positive about them, it's because I believe it, not because I'll have to give back money that they gave me. So I ended up doing that. That did not make my wife very happy. But fortunately, Ag was really gracious to me. I started getting a lot of speaking opportunities.

And just like you guys have found, if you are, I decided to do a podcast because there's no way I could keep up the amount of new ideas, new things to talk about what's going on. So I started a podcast. And this podcast grew and grew and grew. it's called the Vance Crow podcast and it's just me talking to whoever is the most interesting person I can found you you were on there right and it's like hey come tell me about you guys's operation the podcast and ultimately uh I had a listener one time stop by my house and because he wanted to drop a book off and he had his son with him and his son's six years old and as soon as he hears my voice his eyes get

really big and he's like you're the guy on the radio and so um I'm like oh do you want to do you want to do to do an interview yourself and the kid couldn't get past me fast enough. He's like, yeah. And like before his dad even says, yes, we're down in the studio, flipping on lights, turning the cameras on. And there's this six-year-old with his legs dangling down from his chair. And I do an interview with him. And I ask him what a six-year-old could answer? Like, what do you think your dad does all day at work? What food do you wish mom let you eat more of? Who's your best friend? And this kid is like, he's like on meet the press, right? He's like leaning up. He's totally into it. And so I take the interview, I edit it, I send it to his dad.

I'm not going to play it on the air. It wouldn't make sense. And a couple months later, his dad calls me up and he's like, hey, man, the other day I was at a party and we were playing this game. And a question came up, if your house were on fire and you could only grab one thing, what would it be? He's like, I knew instantly it was the interview you did with my son because I can't go back and get it again.

And if I had asked him those questions, he wouldn't have answered them the same way to me that he did for you. He's like, I don't know what you should do with this, but you should do something. So I went out on the podcast and I said, hey, it's a few weeks before Christmas. If anybody wants me to interview your parents or grandparents before the holidays, let me know it would be fun thing to do. I thought I was going to get two or three. I got so many I couldn't get them all done.

And that's when I realized there is a serious hunger for people to capture the stories of their family. They've tried to do it themselves. They tried to give their mom a journal and say, here, write these things down. I've started to see that on like TikTok. You know, there's these books out there that's like, get your dad this book that tells his life story and let him fill out this journal. And it's like, give your dad some homework. Yeah, right.

It's like, I don't know if my dad would fill that out. But no, that's really cool. But that movement of, because it seems like it's popular. People are buying those journals and they think it's a great idea and they want to hear their mom's story or their dad's story. So I think that's really cool. That's an awesome story. Well, I think that it's happened because we used to live a lot closer to our families.

And we, I think, diluted ourselves, even during COVID, like, oh, well, we can have this synthetically. Even though you're not living by mom and dad, you can zoom them, do it on FaceTime. But the truth is, mom and dad don't tell stories over FaceTime. Stories happen when you're fixing something and somebody hurts their hand and you say, I remember the time I hurt my hand or somebody flips over a track. and they say, you know, actually I did that once too. And so you normally tell stories in the course of living, and it's not happening now. And I think that there's like consequences that are beyond just the kid doesn't hear the story.

I think the reality is, and Ag can see this really clearly, it is really important for older people to be able to stop and tell the stories about what happened to them in their lives. And I think that, you know, I've heard you guys talk a bunch on this show about, you know, dad never letting go of the reins. Granddad's still out there running the show. Well, I think in large part, when people start to tell their life stories, they start to let go of being that hyper productive person, that person that's running the show and realizing, oh, no, actually, I can be the wise person.

That's a different role than being in charge. And so one of the biggest outcomes of legacy interviews has been to, people will call me afterwards and say, you're not going to believe this. Dad took his first vacation in 40 years. Or mom decided that she, uh, she's going to leave the farm finally and go move in with her sister. She's wanted to do this forever, but she hasn't done it. But it's a function of the fact that, in my opinion, people aren't telling their life stories. And that's why we can tell that it is stagnating, not just the kids that aren't hearing it, but the adults that aren't getting to tell it. Yeah, I was just going to say, I think it's just as important for the younger generation,

too because, you know, I'd say it all the time on here. I have perspective of what grandpa went through. I have perspective of what you went through. I hear stories about the previous generations that came here and founded this farm. And that gives me drive every day. You know, that gives me perspective that, you know, I'm going through some hard stuff right now. But is it as hard as Grandpa flying a P-51 Mustang in World War II? Probably not.

I can get through this. You know what I mean? And I just feel like that is lost too. Young people's perspective on how good that they have it and what's actually hard, that's getting lost more and more by the day. And I think it's, they don't hear the stories. They don't hear the stories.

And like if you don't hear the stories. So there was research done out of Emory University. I found this after I was starting to do the legacy interviews. It turns out that if you know your family stories, the likelihood that you will go to prison, that you'll get addicted to drugs, that you'll have anxiety problems, depression, go way down.

And this is even true of kids that are adopted into a family. If the family they're being adopted into talks about, this is who we are, this is what we're doing. And it's because we all need to be a part of a fabric. We all need to like, when you're confronted with something, you've probably been like,

what should I do here? Well, the values of my family tell me I should do this. And I think it just clears up. Like, if you're individual and you just pop out to the world and you're like now I'm going to recreate morality from scratch. I'm going to recreate everything from it. It just doesn't work. We're not capable of doing it. Your last name means more when you know those stories. Your pride in your last name means more. I love that.

Yeah. That's what I mean that's what it is. You know, my grandpa did this. My dad did this. I'm not going to be the one to piss down what this name means. You know what I mean? This name means something. I want to make make this name mean even more. Well, good and bad because if you know those stories, I mean, not everybody, not everybody, every family out there has made mistakes. Generations have made mistakes. And it isn't just the good. It's not just the rah, rah, you know, grandpa was this or that. Hearing the stories of what was hard, what was a mistake that you made, those are, those are arguably, those are more valuable than the rah, rah, raw. Yeah. Because, I mean, it's just like, you got to have a mix. Right. You really need, you need to know it all,

but just like in your own life, I mean, we say it all the time. I've learned, we've both learned way more from our failures than our victories. I mean, the victories are way sweeter, but you learn a lot from, from the mistakes. And if you're not, if you're not, if you don't know that story, if you don't know the good and bad, you don't have any frame of reference. So, yeah, like black sheep stories are really important. And, I can already see it, you know, my four-year-old. If I want to communicate a lesson to her, I can talk about silly Charlie, the guy that I worked with or, you know, one of her uncles, it's, you know, causing some problems. And that enables her to create a model of, I want to be like this and I don't want to be

like that. And like, you just can't do it any other way than hearing the real story and being like, hey, that's a vice that took down silly Charlie and I don't want to be taken down. So I'm going to avoid that vice. And I think that it's, it's way, way more important than people have given it credit till this point. Yeah, it's so interesting because if you go back many generations, uh, before we had the kind of recorded history that we do now and the many ways to record that history, all those stories were handed down generation to generation by word of mouth. like you literally sat around the kitchen table or whatever and you got told the stories because I've said this many times the people are like what's the you know what's the guess that you

would love to have on the podcast well the guest that I would love to have on the podcast is my dad because all those stories that I tell people they're all the ones that I got from him but I always think, I just thought about this the other day. It's like, you know that you, you don't tell them as well, and you don't tell them as accurately. And the other thing that I thought about was, I'm, I'm kind of like the resident genealogist in my family. Part of that is because when you live in a house that four generations have lived in and nobody ever gets rid of anything, when you finally get to point that you are the state that it was in that you have to get rid of all this stuff you get down to a point where you have you have books and pictures and journals and things from people who aren't alive and

nobody is alive that knows who those people are you you like you kind of feel the gravity of it's sad to me that my the people that's like so we just got a heritage farm word 150 years so this farm was found in 1835. Is that right? 1835? And, but the only, there's like one picture that has my great-great-grandfather in it, and there's a picture of his tombstone. And that's it. That's all there is. There's no writing. And it's like, where did all those stories go? Somewhere along the way, those stories quit being told and so they're just lost all of that's just lost to history

which you know good or bad you'll never know because it's lost but I think to myself like I hope well we got a little bit there's going to be there's going to be way more of there's going to be way more of torque

for his descendants than what his descendants want just well barring an EMP I guess But anyway, I just think that the value to that, I think, is often lost on people until it's too late. And in my case, the same way. Like, I never thought, when my dad was living, I never thought, oh, this should all get written down or this should all be recorded. Because we'd all heard all the stories.

But there's a lot of stories, I'm sure, that weren't told to me that would have been, that's the other point I wanted to make. you being an outsider there's probably a lot of stories or a lot more openness that you get that the kids the children might not get that story have you seen that experience oh 100% and i don't know what stories are commonly told or not right and a lot of times the parents come in you know they're in there somewhere between 60 to 85 something like that and they come in with their arms crossed and they're like, I'm only doing this because I'm being guilted into it because I'm heard that my grandkids might listen to this one day, but I don't really have that good of a story and they already know everything. And there's a funny thing that happens when people begin telling their stories

is that all the sudden other memories start springing up, stuff that if you had just been like, hey, write down your story, they wouldn't come up with. But if you're asking them questions, and people write me after the fact and they say, if you hadn't done that interview with my parents, I wouldn't have known X, Y, or Z. And people, I got one letter is the most impactful letter I've ever gotten. And it was the day I watched the interview you did with my parents was the day I became an adult. And I'm 45 years old. And they're like, it's because I thought that when my parents were raising us, they already had everything figured out. They knew what was going on. And it wasn't until I heard their interview where they talked about mistakes that they made, times when they

were close to bankruptcy, when their marriage, you know, struggled. And these parents, what happens, they go from having their arms crossed to realizing like, hey, I've got a chance to talk about some stuff that I actually have never stopped and thought about because we got through that bankruptcy or we got through that medical thing and another crisis came up. So we never stopped to think about it. And so what ends up happening is these people go from having their arms crossed to turn into their spouse and saying, we did it. Like we, we actually succeeded. And I think that's probably the biggest lesson that I've learned from legacy interviews is success doesn't feel like success until you stop and look back. Really successful people, people that you could look at objectively,

financially, they have a great family, you know, they live a life that's interesting. And, They do not feel successful. They feel like I'm just doing what's next. I'm just, but taking the time and talking about it gives them a sense of fulfillment that their kids want them to have, but they just don't know how to pass that along. And storytelling is a big part of that.

Yeah. Stopping and looking around every once in a while, doesn't hurt. And talking about. Ferris Bueller's Day off. The greatest quote of all time. Yep. You don't stop and look around once in a while.

You might miss something. Yeah. I think what you have done with this sign-in sheet, I think that is going to be incredibly valuable one day because it's a physical manifestation of all these people that have come through this barn. And like 99.9% of the people will not be memorable. But there'll be somebody that'll say, look, my dad interviewed that guy right there. Yeah. Yeah, like I said, we would wish we had an assistant to take a Polaroid that we could like stick a picture by their name.

But, you know, the signature will do for now. Right. But yeah, we wanted to have some like artificial. fact of this, the podcast of all the people we've talked to. So yeah, I'm taking that back. I'm doing that. Yeah. That's a great idea. What are you, what are your thoughts of people out there? Because, you know, I listen. To me, legacy is huge, right? It's a huge driver for me. And I feel like that's really common in farm families, really common for people that work on the farm, maybe even small businesses or just businesses in general. But there are some people out there with the opinion

that they don't believe legacy matters because they're going to be dead. And when they're dead. Nobody's going to remember them and nobody's going to remember who you are. So just live the life that you want to live. And in a hundred years, everybody's going to forget that you even existed. And so just do your thing and know that if you make a mistake, it's not that big of a deal and you can persevere. Or if you triumph something, don't get too high on your supply because nobody, it doesn't matter at the end of the day. Which that, I get that point. But at the same time, I, like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, what are your thoughts on that? Like, what are your thoughts on that mindset because that I get a little jaded about that just because I know for my own experience

the past generations drive me forward I mean I can I drive myself forward but on those hard days thinking back on the past generations that might give me the edge that I need to get past that hard day and maybe not everybody in this county or everybody in this country remembers you know Lawrence whistler or Samuel Meek but I do and you know that's driving me forward on days that I need it And so I just have a hard time hearing that because it's like legacy, I think is really, really important. And for people to say that, I think it's kind of short-sighted, especially people who make content because that's going to live on there forever, you know, and make you a legend of how much value you gave or whatever. So what are your thoughts on those kinds of people in that

mindset? Well, I think that life and the meaning that we get out of it is the meaning that we put into it. And as you were describing this, it actually reminded me of something I don't think I've ever talked about or explained before, the logo that is the legacy interview logo is actually the uroboros, which is the sign of the snake eating its tail, which means kind of the alpha and the omega, the never-ending, but it's got a twist to it in that it's kind of twisted like the infinity symbol. And then you'll notice one side of it is totally solid and the other side is lines that get thinner and thinner and thinner the further way they go. And we created that when I had been talking to a geneticist that was a really big supporter of the work that I was doing. And she said,

you know, after seven generations, you are as genetically related to that person from seven generations as you are a perfect stranger, a person that you would just meet on the street. And the reality of our family name is not actually about the genes that we pass down. It's about the values that we pass down. It's about how have you prepared the next generation to be ready for all this chaos, all these things that are going to happen in this world. And there's no way somebody 150 years ago could tell you how to raise your kids in the digital age, but they can tell you these are the values that helped us persevere. So to your point, I think the only thing that you do control about the future is what do you put into it? What is the meaning you took away from your

ancestors. What did you earn in terms of wisdom from things that you tried, failed, screwed up, fixed, overcame? Because that's the tiny bit that you get to add into the future to this long legacy of your family. And I think I'm totally with you. I know what it's like to be nihilistic because I was like that before I had, before I decided I wanted to have kids and then went through the catastrophe of not being able to have kids for almost a decade and then having them and then realizing like, I am just a tiny cog in this giant machine, but that's what I get to be is a tiny cog that adds some little, little, little thing to this. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, what you were talking about, it isn't even so much what you're really doing

by taking the time to let people know your mistakes, your accomplishments, whatever. Your legacy isn't necessarily just to your family. It's to everybody that can be receptive enough to learn a lesson. Like, if we all go through life and we all have to just relearn the same crap every generation, as humans, we're not going to progress very well. You know, that's the thing. And everybody has a desire, and this is positive and negative. So one of the hardest things, and we listened to this yesterday on a podcast coming home, is there's a huge problem in our country right now with generations of children that because, well, basically they're growing up entitled. And it's not

through any real fault of their own, it's that we as parents, we naturally gravitate towards wanting our kids to have it easier than we had it. The problem is that when you're growing up, those experiences that are bad and good, those are all the emotions that you're going to have to deal with through your whole life. And so if every time you're, you're going to have to deal with, you have every time that you're fearful or uncomfortable, somebody's there to rescue it from you. Or the example they gave was a kid that had a meltdown because their family was very affluent and the dad was taking the child or children somewhere and they were flying coach, not first class. And the kid just absolutely lost it.

Wasn't used to that. Because they'd never flown coach. And, you know, just, and they were like six, years old and the parent, so the parent went to therapy about this because he was like, what the hell happened? What have I done? Well, what you've done is that child had never experienced anything that was like adverse. Somebody had always stepped in and, you know, smooth it down. Well, you're going to have that all through your life. So if you don't experience all those things and that, and these stories and being able to have a frame of reference that, you know, I'm not the only one that's felt this way that everybody's felt that way. I mean, I think that's,

I think that's super important. And I don't feel so bad for making you suffer. Yeah, I think the term sheet that we were, we were both listening to this podcast on the way home from picking up some meat yesterday. And it was, they were just talking about frustration. Frustration is one of those things that you want to cure for your kids because, you know, you care for your kids. And you don't want them to feel frustrated, but that's the ultimate skill or ultimate feeling that they need to feel is frustration because they need to get out of the frustration. You can't be the one to always solve that or else they're always going to be looking around when they're frustrated and throw a temper tantrum because they're frustrated and they don't know how to get out of it.

So you have to let them feel that emotion. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, it's one of, like, if I look back on all the things that made me who I am today, none of it was the things that came easy. It was all the things that were like, oh, I screwed that up. Oh, it took me about five years to learn that. One of the questions that I asked people during the interview when we get to the parenting and marriage section is when you're raising your kids, did you try to be like your parents or did you try to be different than what your parents did? And it really reveals a lot in what people are saying. Like some people say, I tried to be just like my dad. I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to do things like he did.

I learned a lot from it. And then there are other people that say, oh, I did not want to be like my mother. I wanted to do things totally differently. And I don't have any judgment on that. In fact, I don't have any judgment on anything somebody says during their interview.

They're the hero in their own story. But it is interesting to think about in terms of, are you trying to recreate from whole cloth? There are things you're trying to leave behind? And some people really thrived under the criticism of their father. Some people buckled. There's all these different ways. And it's an interesting question to ask yourself. Did you try to be like your dad or try to be different than him? I try to be, I feel like I tried to be different than him as a young parent. And then the older I got, the more I realized that he was pretty damn smart. And then my wife would just say that I didn't have any choice, that it was so ingrained in me that it was only a matter of time before I just started to become, you know. So in all.

our house, that's kind of a dig. For both of us, it's kind of a dig. If I do something that is really, really stubborn or very just like dig my heels in, Tricia will say, okay, Lawrence, but by the same token, if she, she's very stubborn. So we're kind of the same, which is really great sometimes and it's really hard sometimes because we're both can be very stubborn and when she's that way i'll say okay linda and it instantly gets it instantly gets a rise because we both know exactly what that dig is about but um the thing i'll say about that is i'm the youngest of three sons and each one of us reacted to the only the only the only true north in our childhoods for all three of us was the way my dad acted. So my dad didn't act any

different, but how we interpret it between the oldest to the youngest, it is amazing. And I think it's pretty typical. You know, my oldest brother, he was going to make that happy no matter what. So he was like the soldier that, yep, whatever you say, dad, yep, I'm going to do it and I'm going to do it to the and then my middle brother was like, you know, everything was like finger painting, like, I'm going to do it this way or I don't like this. So I'm just, you know, I'm going to go do my own thing. And I had the advantage of watching both of those. And when it came to me, I was like, well, you know, trying to make him happy didn't work because he still got your assued. And rebelling sure as hell didn't work. So I guess I'm just going to be.

going to go head on with him and when he yells at me, I'm going to yell right back at him and be like a mini. And so we just fought like cats and dogs. But in the end, we all look back and he treated us all the same. It really is just how we interpreted that. And so that long rambling answer is I think that when I started having children, I definitely didn't want to be the disciplinarian that my father was. but at the same time, I feel like I was fairly, I had, I gave, I feel like I gave you guys a wider leash,

but when they hit the end of it, I think I was just about as, I would agree to that. Yeah. So, no, I agree with that. Well, you got to be asking yourself, do you think you'll try and raise your kids like, if I'm as good of a dad as you,

I'll be happy. You did a good job. That's solid, man. That's rock solid. Yeah. That's great. You know, one of the things, a guy that now has become a close friend of mine, I didn't know him before his dad had done a legacy interview, he said something really impactful to me one time. He's like, the whole reason I got this interview for my dad, which is what happens most of the time. People buy it for their parents. He said, the whole reason I did it is because if my girls don't know who my dad was, they won't understand why I was the way I was. 100%. And he was like, I know, they thought I was, you know, really. tough on them and really, you know, unfair, but for them to hear my dad talk about what he went through

and what his dad was, he's like, all the sudden, these pieces will start coming together. And it started a big thing for me that now, whenever I do an interview, I always talk about, hey, I know we always want to put our relatives in the best possible light, but imagine you were to get an envelope in the mail. And it was your grandmother, your great-grandfather. What would you want them to tell? Would you want them to polish those stories so that those people were impossible figures? Or would you want them to tell it like it was so that that way you had the real thing? And that seems to have an impact on people where they, because people don't want to talk badly about their family members, but it's important to talk about what did they do, what did

they overdo, what were their vices, what were their challenges so that way you can understand yourself better three generations later. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Um, it's nobody likes like nobody wants to be the nobody wants to be the bad example everybody wants to be the best example but one have you had any interviews where you walked away and you were just like holy cow i don't know how i don't know how any of these people aren't like in prison or dead and then the other side of it is have you had ones where so what what do you see as common threads have you found any common threads within families that you feel like very successful that are consistent through different interviews and then the same token have you had any that yeah you literally

walked out was like holy cow that's a scary bunch that's a good question the the thing that i'll say that there's a selection pressure sure in legacy interviews because the people that do it are the ones that had kids that wanted their parents' story recorded. So all the people that don't want their parents' stories recorded, I don't see those kids. But that doesn't mean that they had an easy life. And it also doesn't mean that they had a non-conflict relationship with their family. One of the things that has struck me that I walk out of there and my hair is a little blown back is how candid parents are sometimes and how much they say, you know, we were unhappy with

this choice that they made. And this is why we thought about it. And so sometimes I'm like, ooh, how is that kid going to receive that? They may be an adult, but how is that going to be? But I've never actually heard back from anybody, even interviews that I thought like, ooh, mom and dad gave them a haircut. They'll write me and say, that was great. I got to hear all these things I didn't know.

Mom and dad and I started a conversation. So there's something going on there. the thing that I'll say that is that the thread that runs through families that seem to be the most successful are the ones that say we believe that it is important for things to move on into the future right like we believe in they don't necessarily say it as legacy they don't necessarily say it is you got to carry on my family name just that we were passing something down any family that seems to have that idea, you know, I've heard it described as, you know, the candle is being handed from me to the next generation. I've heard it described as like, you know, this money isn't

yours. It's the, it's the family's money that should be passed down. Any family that thinks in multi-generations, that family tends to have much, much higher degrees of success. Yeah, that's interesting. What have you learned from the interviews that you've really applied to your own life and family. That's a great question. I guess biggest thing or most think the top things that come to your head. Well, I'm the parent of two small kids. So when we get into the parenting section, I am hyper tuned in, right? Like, what did you do? Do you know, did you have two parents that worked? You know, did you guys make that work? Did you guys struggle? How much time do we need to be spending with our kids? Should I be taking them on vacations? Is it critical that I have a lake house so we can create memories? And what

I've really come down to is it does not matter your situation. If you are awake and you are saying, I'm trying here. That's probably the best you can do. But my wife and I were talking about this literally on my drive here. The only time we get to talk is when we're both driving. And we really run this conflict. We both run our own companies. And we're like, are we doing this because we're selfish? Or are we doing this because it's going to create a generational thing for our families? Like, would it be better for us to just be a regular employee and have vacation and have a regular salary? Are we taking away from our kids? And when I look back on the hundreds of interviews I've done, I don't see any pattern there between people that ran their own company or people

that worked as employees. What I see is a pattern of people that are like, we cared, we thought about it, we made decisions trying to do the right thing. And that's the thing that brings you the closest to it. So it's not a satisfying answer, but it's like if you're awake and you're trying to do the best for your kids, that's a lot better than not trying. Yeah. Yeah. So my wife is the feeler of the family. We give her a lot of crap that, you know, she's the one that she's the one that always reels everybody back to, back to reality because we'll all run off on whatever great idea we have. you know, I've said this many times.

So about every family meal, the run-up to that is my wife saying to me, okay, now tonight, we're not going to talk about farmer grade or this will do or, you know, we're just going to have. And that doesn't last very long because all of us are driven. Soyer's brother, same way. And so we always end up running off. But we try. We try.

We try for her. Yeah, we do try for her. And thank goodness that we have her to try for. But something that she said is, and I think every parent goes through this, like, both of us, when we started having kids, we had both sets of grandparents. But as parents, you feel so alone. Like, you feel like somebody's played a dirty trick on you when you have children. Because everybody says it. They're like, nobody told us any of this stuff.

Like, nobody told us about this or that or whatever. And I think the truth is that as parents to the next generation, there's just a certain amount of it that you can't. Like somebody probably did tell you, this is going to be hard and, you know, whatever, but you didn't listen. But the beautiful thing about it is like in our situation, if you can weather that storm and you get them out to where they're adults, that perspective of being able to look back, my wife every once in a while will say at, you know, whatever. whatever time. So Clay just got married here a few weeks ago and the next morning, Trisha said, you know, I don't think we did screw them up too bad. We might have done all right. You know, that's, that's a great feeling. But when you're in it, you just, it's just one, it's one catastrophe after another, real or perceived. And so. And as a parent, man, that has been

the thing that I've gotten that nobody else gets, which is I've heard hundreds of people be like, man, raising kids was hard. And all of a sudden it like relieves this pressure on you being like, am I the only idiot that can't get these kids to go the fuck to bed? Yeah. Am I the only one that can't get them to like stop taking off all their clothes right before we're supposed to walk out the door? Like everybody else seems to have this all figured out. And I'm struggling to be at work. And then you hear all these people say they had the same experience. And all of a sudden, you stop feeling, I mean, I stopped feeling both sorry for myself and stop feeling like a sense of that I was wrong. And I'm just like, everybody, everybody, everybody is

just trying to muddle through. That's all that they can do. Yeah. Well, I think we could talk, we could talk about this subject for a long time. But I want to, I want to shift gears a little bit. So you, you're doing a lot. You're speaking. You've got legacy interviews. you're doing your podcast. Your wife has her own business, correct? Yeah, that's right. So something we like to ask people about is, is there any work-life balance? And is that a fallacy that we all strive for? Because everybody says you need to have a work-life balance. But when you're in it, is there, is there? And how do you two, do you have any advice on that? Well, I probably don't have any advice about much of anything, right? Like I, I've come to realize that I don't know anything about what's going on.

I think work life balance is that corporate bullshit that they try and tell you that, and it's like a delusional thing, right? The people that have work life balance in a corporation don't actually succeed. Right? They aren't the ones that get moved up because they're not willing to sacrifice their family for the larger business. It's the same thing as retirement being this like, hey, when you get to retirement, you get to run off the dock and jump into the water and everything's, you know, everything's great. These things don't actually exist. But I got to say, like, I feel a tremendous amount of concern.

Am I outsourcing my, raising my kids by working and putting them in daycare? And, like, should I have a better work life balance? Are my kids better off if I make, you know, this business successful in my work, be, able to bring in stuff for our family or are they better off if i'm sitting there playing gymnastics with them i don't i don't think there is a singular right answer but it it feels like the struggle is real yeah absolutely well where where are you headed like what is your what right now this time of your life what is your goal for your i guess for your for your for your business side like what what are you striving for right now? Candidly, like, can the business survive, right? So we're in the

phase where between speaking and legacy interviews, you're like, hey, this is the easiest business I've ever done. It's all working out. And then you go two months later and you're like, how are we going to make this work? And what should I be doing differently? And so, you know, I always used that phrase. I saw it on X at one point where it's like, we didn't do this because it's easy. We did it because we thought it would be easy. So, you know, a lot of it is can my wife and I keep our two businesses going and keep our kids in school and clothed and these kinds of things? Long term, I have to say, like, I am more successful already in my life than I ever imagined

I would be when I was 25. And so I am blessed or cursed. My brother thinks it's a curse, you know, he always wants to do more. he's been very financially successful so he gets to a certain point and then he moves the goal line out yeah and i have a thing i don't think it makes me super manly but i'm kind of like i've already surpassed where i thought i would be yeah so maybe i should be taking stuff off the table maybe i should be more gentle on myself and so it's a struggle you know because you don't know what the future is going to bring and so you do want to be like well let me grab more but the reality is

like you only live once and the people that I see that are wealthy that are in their 70s, they would trade all the wealth that they have to be in the chaos that we're in right now. And so, you know, like I'm trying to take that in and live by that. But, you know, you also have a wife and you want to make sure she has a good life and she doesn't have to work too hard and you've got kids and are you outsourcing it. So there's that conflict all the time. Yeah, I, I've listened to a few people. And they always say, you know, some of the wealthiest people in the world, their biggest regret when they get to their end of their life, is that they didn't spend enough time with their loved ones. That's the number one regret a lot of those guys have.

And so, I mean, I think everybody struggles with that. We struggle with it. I'm going to be getting married next summer. And then, you know, next step, have kids. And I'm doing, I'm running and gunning all the time. And I'm busier than I've ever. been and I'm I love doing it and sometimes it's a lot sometimes it feels like great but trying to map out how the hell am I going to be able to do what I'm doing now when I have children just I can't even comprehend it it's it's one of those things that I'm like I'm going to have to figure something out I'm going to have to do something different I'm going to have to outsource do I want to outsource outsource the care for our kids on the day to day. Do we want, do I want my fiancee or my then wife to stay at home? You know, it's all those things. Those are, you're not alone in that.

I mean, I think about that stuff too. So I will say this, that legacy interviews has gotten me out of the bubble of what the media is telling you about work life balance and, you know, people regret not spending enough time. I have had lots of people say, I don't regret how much time I spent working. My family needed that. That's just the way that it was. I've had mom say, hey, at working, I could have stayed home with the kids, but it wasn't the right decision for me. I needed to be out.

My mind needed to do things. And that has been such a breath of fresh air to me because you hear these things over and over again, work-life balance, retirement, you know, saving for the future. And then you have some other people come in there like, yeah, my kids didn't get to see me, but what they saw was how to work hard and what it takes to make it all work. And that, to me, has been like... oh, okay, there's another way to look at this. And when I hear this man talk about his family and how much he loves him and how much his family loves them, like, you can make this work too.

It works out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, it's, uh, I think it all comes down to setting boundaries with your time, you know, it just is. The only reason I laugh is because we have, it's like a monthly, it's like a monthly deal at some point you and I or you and I, Clay or Corey, we'll sit there and we'll talk about this. And we all, we, nothing changes,

but we have the same conversation. It's like, yeah, it's discipline. It's discipline. We just got set boundaries. Time management. Time management. I mean, it's, it's literally like we play our own game of bullshit bingo. If you've ever been one of, to like one of those, like a Zig Zig Ziglar deal where they go around. And we used to have it where we'd hand out cards between me and these two salesmen that we, that we'd get sent to these things. And on it, we're all the bullshit Bingo words like paradigm shift and stuff like that. And every card was different as how they were printed. And so if you were sitting there and, you know, they have three or four of these speakers and somebody hit every one of those phrases, you had to jump up and yell bingo. And if you got it,

then you got all the free drinks, you know, at the night. But sometimes I feel like we do the same thing because we all sit around when we're overwhelmed and we're like, okay, we got to get back on track, you know, discipline, time management, boundaries, da-da-da, we feel real good. And then, you know, four days later. The funniest thing about having kids, though, is you have all the same priorities exactly like you were saying. Only the amount of time you get to talk to your wife goes down about 95%. So you're trying to do all that same kind of like, let's figure these problems out, let's work on this. But you have to do it in 5% of the time because the rest of the time your kid is throwing things on the floor or they want milk and like, or they're trying to.

Things that I never imagined I would put up with you all of a sudden are like, well, I guess I don't have a choice here. So are you happy being painting your own path? Are you happy with the path that you're on being a business owner? And kind of doing your own thing. Yes. I mean, when I was at Monsanto, the reason I stayed there in corporate America was because they let me have almost total freedom. Once I earned my way to say I'm going to change culture, but I'm going to do it in my own way. And they gave me a lot of lot of support. But when that started to look like it wasn't going to happen, I started this business. It is not my dream to be a business owner. I, it's not, I don't care about being in charge. I like, I love my employees. They're fantastic employees. But the thing that I want to do is, hey, I think it's important for me to drive to Iowa today. I think I want to be able to do that.

And I don't want to ask permission. I want to make sure I can coordinate it with my wife. But like, when you're in corporate America, there's somebody that's above you. and somebody that's above them and somebody that's above them. And if we look at the Peter principle, all of them are beyond their own capabilities. So they're incompetent in some way. And you're asking them for permission to do something you know in your heart. That's the right thing to do.

And that's what I want. It has nothing to do with being in charge. It has everything to do with, I don't want to ask permission. And I don't want to have somebody to have the power over me to say that's not what you should do. Yeah. If you had a job and you had autonomy, me, you'd be fine working for somebody else, but that doesn't really exist. Hell yeah. Wouldn't it be

great to be like, I'm going to make this much money this month? I'm going to. It would absolutely. But those, there's very few of those jobs that exist. So, I mean, I guess when you when you get right down to it, and I think I'm on this, I'm on this boat. I just look at it. It's like, I should have bought more Bitcoin and it should be higher by now. Like, why isn't it So when you and I talked the last time, we basically, we didn't even talk about this on the podcast. We were sitting and having dinner. We were having lunch after the podcast. And one of us made a random comment about crypto and Bitcoin specifically. And both our eyes lit up like Chris this morning. And I think you said, you know, you have Bitcoin or you know, you talk about Bitcoin. I'm like,

oh yeah, 100%. Instant regret that we didn't talk about it on the podcast. So I didn't want to let that pass. So I guess I'll just ask you, like, how did you, like, how did you find that? Or where did that come from that you got the bug of Bitcoin? And I feel like we've moved through the, there's so much going on in our society. And crypto in general, but Bitcoin specifically, there's just this, like, it just comes and goes in waves. like the news cycle I didn't think Michael Saylor would ever not be on the front page of somewhere

because he's just like so resolute in his mission but it ebbs and flows like you don't hear anything you don't see anything the price just kind of stays and then every once in a while one random thing happens and now then everybody's talking about it like it's come out of nowhere and then it just subsides But so your Bitcoin journey, where did that start?

It started in 2012, 2013. I had a buddy, I had a couple buddies that were computer nerds. And there's one guy in particular. He told me about it once. He told me about it again. And then we were out for my birthday. And we were smoking hookah and like sitting around. And I was like, all right, give it to me one more time.

What's this thing, Bitcoin? And when it clicked, I think this is like for everybody, it's like you just got to glimpse the end of the universe. You had this like, oh my gosh, those were ideas that I would have said were actually impossible, that we could never do that. And now you have this flood of possibility and you begin your journey of 100 hours or whatever you've got to do to get there. And along the way, I was using Bitcoin. I wrote an article about Warren Buffett being wrong about it, which got in all kinds of major outlets. I had a client at the time. I had a client at the time, I was doing some communications work and I had him pay me in Bitcoin.

And that made big news because nobody was doing this. And in St. Louis, it was a big deal. And just kept going from there. You know, you talk about waves. Here's a funny thing that happened the other day. So that client paid me 10 years ago in Bitcoin to do a month's worth of work for him. That was literally the single best investment I've ever made in my life. It was very, it worked out great, makes it so I can run a business now.

I just the other day was in talks with, I won't name them, but a Farm Bureau group. And they said, hey, we'd love to have you come to a two-day talk here. Can you give us a rate? I gave them my rate. They said, oh, that's way out of the bounds of what we can do. We can do about half of that. And I, you know, I'm a negotiator. I'm always looking for like, how can we find a way to make this work?

And so I said, I tell you what, it's for a young farmer and ranchers group. These guys are young and up and coming. Bitcoin has now hit the the mainstream because Donald Trump is saying we should have a national Bitcoin reserve. So I said, how about we do this? I'll accept your half rate, but you guys pay me in Bitcoin and appoint a person from your young farmer and ranchers group to be the person I'll teach how to buy it on exchange, move it to a wallet and send it to me. And I'll do it for half. It's going to cost you half as much as my rate. And the guy was he loved it. And then he went to ask for permission and he came back 24 hours later and said absolutely not we cannot do it

can't do it and you think this is crazy that we're now 10 years away from that and people are still saying no you can't do it and it's not like they had to hold it I was thinking the reason I want to do this is because I'll be able to make up more than the amount of money in publicity we'll be able to talk about it we'll be able to say look at how innovative this young farmer and ranchers group is, we'll be able to say, look at where Bitcoin is going. It would give me a chance to talk about where I think Bitcoin is going to influence agriculture. Nope. Some leader somewhere said, oh, that's bad money or whatever. I haven't heard the full story. But it just, so that's how far we've come. It's not that far. Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you another crazy, to me, just a crazy

comparison, I guess. So, like that group there of younger people, you know, progressive, trying to get started, farming, ranching, they don't want anything to do with it. In our local town here, the grocery store, like two months ago, I know the manager fairly well, and he listens to the podcast, he listens to the podcast once in a while, and he's asked me about crypto, asked me about Bitcoin, and he knows, he knows some about it, but he said to me, goes, hey, he's like, guess what we're getting? I said, I don't know. He goes, we're getting a, we're getting a Bitcoin ATM. I said, really? And he's like, yeah, he goes, I don't know what the hell anybody's going to do with it, basically. And I was in there just this morning. And what's

curious to me about it is. So in your example, there's a group of people that evidently thought it was probably way too complicated or somehow they were going to lose money on it or it wasn't secure or whatever. I'm in that grocery store this morning getting a bag of ice. And there is a young Hispanic family in there. And they're using that. And the guy, the husband, I knew the husband, because he used to work in construction. And I said, hi to you. I said, hello, how's it going? And I said, I said, do you like using that? They said, yeah. I said, you know, what are you doing? Sending money back to his parents. And he said, you know, I love it because it's fast and way less fee, way cheaper. They used to send money Western Union. And Western Union is, I don't know if

they're still in business or not, but Bitcoin is so more efficient, so much faster. So on the one hand you have in our culture i feel like there's still this stigma that it's so complicated you know it's it's so hard to use and it's it's in the shadows and and there isn't a use case for it you can't buy coffee with yeah there's no use case for it but then you have a whole group of people that you could make the argument for would be the people that you know wouldn't adopt something like that they see the value of it and they they're all using it because it is the most efficient way to transfer value over great distances or short distances, and it's the cheapest way to do it. And I just thought, wow, that, I mean, that's awesome. But it's so weird. Well, if you're a Michael

Saylor person, this isn't going to be too crazy for you, but I think it is actually Bitcoin has the potential to keep millions of family farms together. I think that if it becomes ubiquitous and the price continues to go up, then you start using farmland not as a store of value. Right now, all these hedge funds, all these family offices, they have billions of dollars, and they're like, how can we put our money somewhere that's not the stock market, but preserve its value? Well, we'll buy farmland. Why? Because farmland is scarce. Yep. And now Bitcoin offers you a chance to store the value of your money, but not have to deal with all the, bullshit of having farmland. So you can get these hedge funds out of there. Then they're not hiring

farm managers. They're not, you know, only renting ground completely blind of who's doing it. And instead, you get farmland back to its utility price, which is what we want in the United States. We want farmland to be at the utility price because otherwise, when you go to hand that land down to your son and he's got to buy it from you, if the price of that land keeps going up, it makes it So your son has to take on a loan that's, you know, going to be way priced out of what's possible. And so now you've got to start selling land in order to be able to pass it down. So Bitcoin is critical to this. And ag should be literally the biggest supporters in the United States for Bitcoin.

See, we just had this conversation because we were just talking about, we were talking about the value of land versus the income that you make off of it. And it's grain farming. Great, yeah, straight grain farming. And it's, it's ridiculous. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. Your return on investment is terrible. The only way it is a store of value, so you buy it, holds its value, grows over time, and you sell it, get your money back out. But if you're a family farm, that's not the plan, because the land is the tool. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great, a great possibility. Give people your thousand foot view on it of just try selling it to people

Like what why should they If they're not intrigued about Bitcoin Why should they get intrigued about it? Why should people want to adopt it? Why? What was the selling point for you that like, man, this is like I got to look into this more. I got to get on it.

The thing that's truly magical about Bitcoin is that it is true scarcity And there is almost nothing scarce in this world. We perceive gold to be scarce, but the reality is it's as soon as that price goes up high enough, then that gives people the capital to go mine more gold. So it's always inflating somewhere around a one and a half to two and a half percent every year. So gold, if you just held it, goes down. Dollars, obviously the U.S. government can go and just print as many as they want and then the value of how much that can buy goes down. The only real thing that's scarce in this world is land and

Bitcoin because Bitcoin has been capped at 21 million Bitcoin. And the reason that this is so interesting, the reason that this is like mind boggling is everything else that is digital is the exact opposite of scarcity. If you take a photo with your camera, you can replicate that photo infinitely. Right. And so what we have is with Bitcoin is that they've created something that you can say, this is digital, so I get all the benefits of it being digital. I can send it to Mexico. I can, I can move it around. It doesn't need to be stored in a physical location. But then you also have the benefit of it being completely scarce. And that scarcity, which is the thing that everybody doubts, they always say, well, how do you know that it's going to stay 21 million? And it won't,

someday somebody won't get in charge of it and make it worth 20, or make 22 million Bitcoin. And the truth is if you change that code, which you can do, you can download that code and you can make a change to it. As soon as you do it, then you have to convince everyone else to use that code, which would be that there's 22 million. Well, all these people that have been working in the system where there's 21 million say, well, that would evaporate the value of my, of my Bitcoin if we started inflating it. So no, I don't want to do it. So everybody involved in Bitcoin has the incentive not to change it. Even though it could be changed, they won't change it because that scarcity is what gives them value. And so this scarcity is something that I would challenge anybody

that doubts Bitcoin, find another example of scarcity and another way that you can send digital values from one person to another. And there's nothing else on earth like it. It's truly incredible. And the other thing, or another thing I'll add to that is the disconnect with within media, within just regular people about the safety of Bitcoin. Over the last two years, I would say, there has been so much talk and I guess, I don't know, rattling, you know, oh, they're going to shut down crypto. They're going to shut down Bitcoin.

because as the world talks about moving to a digital currency, digital dollar, digital Chinese won, oh, they're going to outlaw Bitcoin. Well, the problem with it is that it does not have a central ledger and people on every continent of the world are running the program. To be able, you cannot, like you cannot regulate it, but you cannot make it. You can't seize it. You can't because it's not in a bank. Like there's just some concepts that people have a hard time, I guess, grasping. One, people have a

really hard time. They want something physical. And to those people, I'm like, well, go buy yourself a digital wallet that you can hold in your hand and say it's all in here, even though it's really not. And please, if you do that, have more than one. But anyway, you know, people have a hard time getting around that or getting that square. It is, to me, it's the more things in our world that are uncertain and untruthful, the more things that I can't trust, the more I trust Bitcoin, because you can't manipulate it. That's what I really like. I think another hard thing that people, that's hard for people to wrap their mind around is, okay, well, who created it?

And then where is this guy? Why isn't he out and about? Why can't nobody, it's, what is it, Sikasha? Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah, yeah. You know, everybody says his name, but nobody knows who it is. And people, I think, also get a little jumpy at that idea of, well, this guy created this currency, and he's just not around.

Nobody knows where he is, and they don't know who he is. and they don't know who he is. Well, I've narrowed it down. It's either Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump. One of those two guys created it. Not you? No. Well, maybe, but I'm not going to say.

Well, I think the reason that I was able to get on board with Bitcoin was because I had friends that were computer coders. And they had explained to me long before this, the value of open source code, which is something that when you go to tell corporate America, let's have open source anything. They're like, no, I want to patent it. Monsanto wouldn't do anything they couldn't patent. But the reality is it truly doesn't matter who Satoshi Nakamoto was because the code that people are running on their minors, the way that the whole system works is run through software that you can see every single line of code. And if there was anything hidden in there like a trap door or a back door, in fact, like somebody would have seen it.

And in fact, the truth is that that code has been updated by programmers so many times that it's something like less than out of 15. percent of it is the original code because it continues to be updated. And so Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't have anything to do with the way that it works. And thank goodness he left, right? Everybody else that stayed around that's the founder of something. If Elon Musk says something or Twitter goes bad in some way, X, it's Elon Musk's fault. If Apple had anything go wrong with it, it was Steve Jobs's fault. And if they have personal flaws, that person is an idiot. That takes down the brand of the thing. By not having that Satoshi Nakamoto did a great service to our whole world by having the humility to let it go and just let it be open source. Yeah, don't you find it, I found it incredibly interesting.

And we're kind of past this now by a year or so. But to go back when Michael Saylor kind of first burst on the scene, there's some great, you know, the internet never dies. And, uh, social media haunts people forever. And the montage of venture capital and, um, uh, you name it. Um,

they're all, they're all, I can't think of any of their names off the top of my head. But, you know, all your, all your, all your,

all those people calling it rat poison and pet rocks and all that bullshit. That now hold it. it's it's just so funny how and when bitcoin for me was also kind of a wake-up call i i had a really unique experience with it in the fact that the same time that i started to go down and learn bitcoin was the same time that i became a tesla investor and it was one of those things where I'm a little bit of a contrarian, and I really, I was really interested in what Tesla was doing at the time,

and I decided just, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to just download the annual report, and I'm going to just read it. And that was at the time where everybody was shortening it, and it was just going to drop, you know, they were going out of business, they were done. And I got through that and I'm like, I think they're going to be all right. I think they really know what they're doing.

And I started buying Tesla. And, you know, it's not done what I thought it would do. I still think that it will eventually be one of the biggest companies in the world. It already kind of is headed there. But at that same time, the media was just, you know, just beating them, beating them. Well, Bitcoin was the same way. And as I got more into Bitcoin, it really changed my whole perspective on media and on people's perception being shaped by people that they perceive to really be smart. But in reality, they were just controlled by a narrative too.

and when you kind of pull yourself away from that and you stand back and you look, man, the world gets a lot less genuine. Like you just kind of wake up. So Bitcoin is kind of like, it's kind of like the, it's like the red pill, I guess. You know, once you accept, once you accept some of the realities of Bitcoin and the it works and the reason that it's the way it is, then you kind of look at the rest of the world kind of through that same lens and you're like, I don't think, I don't think these people are telling us the truth about a lot of things. And so, you know, to me, it's been, it's been just

kind of a lens that I look through the rest of the world. And I'm totally with you. I don't, I don't know if you guys ever use, like, I sometimes will use a joke to find out is this person and I, are we going to be able to vibe? You know, if they, if they don't get this joke, we're probably not on the same page. What I found out is with Bitcoin, you don't have to agree that Bitcoin's good, but if you're not curious, if your answer is, no, that's dumb, oh, no, that's Pet Rocks or whatever, chances are a lot of the opinions that you have about things are received wisdom. Somebody else told you this thing, so you're carrying it forward. Now, you could say, if somebody, you know, is really into Bitcoin, they just happen to find a podcast that they like that convince them of it.

But when I talk to an older person, you know, I've been on bank boards, when I go to give talks, if I'm talking to a person and this comes up and they're just like, nah, nope, don't like that. It's going to make me discount everything that you say if you're just completely dismissive of it. You don't have to agree with me on Bitcoin, but if you're not curious, what does that say about all the rest of your opinion? I agree with you there. Where do you think it's headed? Where do you think a year, three years, five years?

where where do you feel like it ends up you think we're going to have a bitcoin bitcoin spring what you're supposed to have a spring bitcoin spring or whatever well i grew up my dad was a stockbroker um he's actually like stockbroker to farmers in central Illinois and one thing i learned is price predictions or fools Aaron you shouldn't do it and actually the way that you keep yourself calm about bitcoin is you laugh at the pain right you just if it's now down 30% just you know make it as painful as possible so that only the truest believers stay in this game. But I will say this. There is no question that governments are mining it. They are turning their energy infrastructure towards it. Russia, China, El Salvador, the U.S. states within our own country, you know, Wisconsin's

pension board, Michigan's, Arizona just passed a law for it, Texas. So as you're watching institutional adoption, this is going to make it where people realize what true scarcity looks like. And I think the best comparison we can make to it, the one that really hits you viscerally is, remember when COVID happened and there was not enough toilet paper and people were willing to wait in line and they would pay whatever it took to get that toilet paper? Wait until it happens that that's your financial instrument. And it's not just what's happening at your Sam's Club or your grocery store. this is happening worldwide. Everybody is saying, I'm going to run as fast as I can, whether it's because they know the exits are being shut off, or it's because they realize that price is shooting up.

But you will have an experience within our lifetimes. I wouldn't, within a decade something where all this money printing hits a point where people have this realization. And then the stampede will be so vicious that it will literally be indescribable. We don't have the words or the imagery to describe it, which is why even if we're wrong, 1% of whatever your portfolio in Bitcoin protects you from this if that frightens you. And if it doesn't frighten you, if it excites you, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. You know, do you think that's too extreme? No, I don't think it's too extreme at all. I think the more that institutional investors get into it, the more they're going to make it popular. People are going to have more trust in it. People are going to

want to invest in it. And yeah, the way that the country is being ran in inflation and our dollars being worth less and less, you know, I thought we'd see a surge because of the money printing in inflation, but it really hasn't happened yet, which surprises me. But also what makes me feel better about it is, you know, you guys were talking, oh, this Bitcoin, it ebbs and flows. It ebbs and flows. Well, it's kind of stayed, you know, it hasn't really descended like it had in the past. I feel like it's here to stay. I feel like people realize of all the crypto,

Bitcoin's the king, and it's going to stay. It's going to have its place. I have no doubt that it's going to have its place in the world. It's just how big of a, how big of a stake is it going to have in the future? That's what we'll have to find out. But I do think it has a stake in the future. And I do think, you know, personally,

I want to have a little bit. bit of stake in that for sure. However big or small that is, I think to be on the safe side, diversifying habit. But I see its utility. I see the power of it. I see the value in it. It's just can it get adopted throughout the world? And I think if government and institutions keep doing what they're doing, you might see

a stampede. So I don't think that's out of the question at all. on the ag tribes report, which is this weekly news podcast I do. And what I do is I bring on somebody from a different ag tribe from all over the country to talk about what's the news going on in your world. What are milk prices doing? What's grain prices doing? But I had a really good piece of advice from Cory Hilbo from farm for profit. He said, you should start pricing land in Bitcoin. And so each week, I noticed you, you know, you read your Bitcoin price on here. Now I'm each week I'm going to do, how much is an acre of land in your property and how much Bitcoin would it take to buy that acre and

how many acres can you buy with one Bitcoin? And right now, it's, you know, maybe holding steady. But one day people are going to realize, oh, if I had bought a Bitcoin, I could now own 20 acres, 30 acres of Iowa farmland to what end? I don't know. But like I'm trying to create as many different ways of looking at this to wake people up to it as possible. And the beautiful thing about it is if you went to a land auction that they were using Bitcoin, you could settle the deal before your truck left the parking lot. Wouldn't that be amazing? And you would not need, you would not need, you wouldn't even need a letter of credit. You literally could have your wallet say, this is what I got. The transaction could be done out the door. And you could, you could actually do

the title train. The beautiful thing about blockchain. Yeah, I was going to ask you. I mean, And that's not just Bitcoin, but blockchain in general is we've spent a lot of time talking about AI and people are worried about all the people that are going to be displaced by AI. Well, if you can start doing legal transactions on the blockchain, that is, in my mind, that's equally as disruptive as AI, because there are an incredible number of positions and jobs, mostly lawyers and bankers, involved in real estate transactions, that if you were to make those transactions on the blockchain,

you wouldn't need those people. Because you can't fudge a contract when it's a digital contract on the blockchain. And I don't think people realize that. Well, in addition to that, another big thing that you be able to do with Bitcoin, that'll be very important, is you'll be able to sign your messages. So you'll be able to sign. This is actually a video I created because imagine all the AI that can create videos of you saying whatever, right? So a presidential candidate happened to say, I'm going to put down

a Satoshi to make this happen. The other thing that I would love to see happen, Saylor talks about this, is you can send me junk mail, but in order to do it, you have to put some Satoshis on it like a stamp. So that can come into my inbox, but the only way you're going to be able to send something to me is if you attach some Satoshes to it. And then those Satoshes are basically like the stamp that says, we can't spam this to a million people because they'd cost us a million Satoshes. So the people that are trying to send out lots of emails or whatever kind of things, they are paying for it. You're receiving some value, but it keeps them from wanting to do DDoSs to your in-mill.

Yeah, the use cases are crazy. One thing I wanted to ask you about, this might be, I don't know, because you and I haven't talked about this. This might be kind of fringe. have you have you seen or heard of um i think there's a couple of sites a couple of systems that are running this but have you heard of a a site called next earth that is basically digitized what they did was they digitized the entire world all the real estate everything and it runs on matick is the is the coin it runs on but there's

Their whole thing is kind of that validating everybody. You can buy real estate on there. You can buy the digital version of this barn on there, although you can't because I own it. I bought it. I was scared that somebody might take it, so I bought it. And it's very cheap, you know, they're still growing, trying to get. but their idea of it is that it mirrors every parcel,

I can't remember how big a piece is, to where they're trying to get to the point that if you were buying a physical property, that the transaction could take place through their portal to where there's no way to fraudulently transfer real estate assets. assets. That's their, that's their model. And I've watched it. It's been, it's been going now for a couple of years and it continues to just grow. And it's so curious to me because when you, on the, on the, on the front side of it, it seems very crazy. Like you're just kind of like playing

what was the, what's the game, the mining game that you played with your kids? Minecraft. I mean, it feels like Minecraft. But, the number of people on it and the number of exchanges of people buying and selling digital property on that. And now then they're moving into where if you own that piece, you can overlay your company's website to where someone that clicks on that property goes to the website of the business that owns it in the real world. And it's just this, it's this weird e-commerce thing. But that kind of that kind of activity, that kind of business, that kind of model, I mean the opportunities that are out there in the world of crypto, and what gets, it just keeps evolving. And it's an

unbelievable example of the creativity that people have. And to me, it's really exciting because it just, it really challenges what you think is possible. And I'm like, I don't know where it's all going, but I'm, I'm happy that we're here and I'm thankful that we, like, we have, that we have Bitcoin. What's your, what's your preferred wallet? Oh, that's a great question. So I actually have a guy that's coming down from Canada to do a legacy interview. And he's like, but if I come, will you help me set up a wallet? He wants to do it. So I was like, all right. The entry level wallet is a treasurer for me. That one's the one that's the easiest to use. You hook it up to your computer. So there's some downsides to that, but it's relatively secure.

Very like user from them. Just don't leave it plugged in all the time. Yeah. Yeah. And but the one that I use for, for like real security is the coin kites cold card. I believe. Yeah, explain that. Because I have, I wasn't familiar with it. So this one is, it's about the size of a credit. card and what you do is you keep this completely off of the internet. So what you have is a software wallet where you can you can see like hey at this address there's this much Bitcoin. Now if I want to sign something so that that way I can send it from me to you then I use my card that I enter my password on there and then I take the card there's like a little microSD card and put it into my computer and say, okay, on this software wallet that you're using called Sparrow, I'm going to sign

that transaction so it can go over to you. Now, I don't ever have to put that little card back into my wallet because that is just a signer. It just says, hey, I'm putting this transaction in. So this is why people call it an air-gapped thing. Nobody ever has the opportunity to touch the hardware device that you're storing your seed word phrases on that could somehow get on. So that's what I wanted. It's a bit more technically complex, but I think it's worthwhile. So correct me if I'm wrong. So every, do you reuse that SD card or do you use a fresh SD card whenever you want to transfer? In other words, I'm assuming you connect an SD card. It's got a slot for a micro SD card. So you put that in there and then on the card you transfer whatever,

you transfer whatever amount of Bitcoin you want to send to the SD card and basically okay it on the card. It's a little bit simpler than that actually. So on my computer, I run a wallet called Sparrow and that shows. So if I then say, hey, I want to send some to torque. So I put your address into a transaction. And then it says, okay, well, you need to sign this transaction. So then I take my card and I say, I want to sign this transaction. And I take that card out and I put it in and that's the signature.

And then I get rid of that card. It can only go for that one transaction. And there's not a back and forth. And then I do, but I'm like a psychopath. But I mean, really, there aren't that many out transactions. Bitcoin's about coming in. I'm taking it in. But I'll say this, the thing that is, I think, way underappreciated, have you set up a node for your Bitcoin? No, I have not. Okay, so this is the thing I have put out this invitation that on my Vance Crow podcast,

I will allow the first person that has their kid set up a node. I'll have them and their kid on my podcast to talk about it. And people always tell me, oh, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And then they don't or they can't get their kid into it. But when you set up a node, your knowledge level of what's really going on with Bitcoin goes way up because a node, So right now, if you don't have a node, if you have a treasurer, what happens is you say, hey, I want to send Bitcoin from me to you. I'm typing this in essentially saying Trezer, would you submit this transaction to the network? And then the network will go. And then you get to, you'll get your Bitcoin. Now, as long as Treasers, you know, working, then that works fine.

But if I get blacklisted for some reason. Yeah, there's some reason that they don't, they don't want that transaction to occur. I don't want to have to trust them. Right. So what I did was I took a little computer called a Raspberry Pi and I set it up to run the Bitcoin system and then I downloaded the blockchain. Now, keep in mind, I got fiber optic cable. I'm in the city.

This is a jet engine that the only thing it is doing is downloading the blockchain, which is every single transaction that there is in the world. So at first, it's like downloaded 3%, 4%. 5%, you're watching it go, right? And then it starts slowing down. And I have this thing, and I set it up three or four years ago. This is a jet engine throttle all the way down. It took me five days to download the entire blockchain. That's how big that is. Imagine a file that took you five days with fiber cable to download. Now, now if you download it, that thing keeps every single transaction going. And as long as it has every transaction, that means it's a functional node. So now I can go to my node when I want to send you money and I enter the transaction into that node using my card and it sends it to you. I don't have to go ask Trezer. Yeah. So you're completely autonomous. That is when I actually retired from being on the board of directors of a bank because I was like, I came in and was like, hey guys, let me tell you how this thing

works. And they're like, we're not interested. And I was like, this is the future. You don't understand. Right now the whole system is set up that there has to be an intermediary. Now, There is no intermediary. You can run your own bank. You have your own rails. ACH is going to go away. Visa MasterCard, who are functionally central like CBDs, they are going to go defunct once people realize what you can do with the node. Yeah, you weren't completely correct there. When you told them this is the future, you bet it's the future of money, but there's a reason why they didn't like it because that's not the future of banks. Yeah, I mean, there's a role for banks. It was more complicated. I kind of say this for effect that I left the bank because of that, but I definitely

woke me up. Like, if we're working on the future, if you guys are not working on this, you're not working on the future. You're trying to preserve the past. Right. There is a potential role for banks, right? Because if you are holding Bitcoin at your house and you don't have it so that you have to have multiple signatures on your wallet, somebody come to your house and say,

give me all your Bitcoin or I'm going to shoot your child, right? Right now, the reason they can't do that with your business. bank account is because the bank would reverse the charges or it would stop the ATM. They're the backstop. So there's a chance that what you could do is have banks that say we'll hold it in a in a safety deposit box or we will be one of the signers so that if somebody, if you want to do a transaction, not only do you have to get it off of my card, but I have to get it off somebody else's card to make it combined and then it's more safe. That's not what banks are doing now, but they will eventually. Yeah. Do you think that, do you think as the adoption of Bitcoin goes up that Bitcoin will, like I kind of perceive a day where if you have Bitcoin, that's like your guarantee.

And I'm not necessarily sure whether your day-to-day transaction are going to be in Shatoshis or whether it's your, it's kind of like an operating line. credit, backstop by the value your land. In other words, I feel like Bitcoin will be, you'll have it, and you will somehow declare that I have this much Bitcoin. But to do your regular day-to-day transactions, you will operate using some other mode and at whether that's once a day or once a month, those transactions will reconcile back. You just invented the Lightning Network. Are you familiar with Lightning? Absolutely. So for people that don't know, a Bitcoin transaction, every about 10 minutes, the miners get a little dose of, of, it's called the subsidy. So every 10 minutes, 3.25 Bitcoin are thrown into the system,

and they're mining to be able to grab that little bit. And now every transaction that my node puts in, it is a part of that. And so after 10 minutes, when somebody's found that random number and they get all those Bitcoin plus the fees, then my transaction goes through. But that might take 10 minutes. It might take 20 minutes. It actually might even take up to 30 minutes. So that can take a long time and there's fees associated with it. It might cost me 50, 60 Satoshis to be able to do that. So somebody invented what's called like the second layer called Lightning. The way Lightning works is you take, 100,000 Satoci's. There's 100 million Sotoshes in a Bitcoin. You take just a small percentage and you put it into your lightning wallet and then it works like an abacus. And so it doesn't come out of a lightning system. The Bitcoin system knows, hey, he sent it to this address. And now you and I can do transactions. Me and Sawyer can do transactions. And then whenever I decide, actually, I want to take that out of lightning, then I'm going to put that back. And that's when you package all of the transactions together and put it as,

into the Bitcoin system. I know this is getting a little bit funny. But instead of having every single one of those trades go on need to be submitted to the blockchain, which takes at least 10 minutes, now we can do that really, really fast. But because it's just an abacus, we're sending money back and forth to one another. It isn't until I want my money out of the system that it packages it, and you have to pay a fee. With lightning, you're paying a very, very small fee. Yeah. Yeah. So you invented lightning in your own mind. there is so believe me there's usually it's more smoke up here than lightning i feel like i don't know where the lightning is but a lot of smoke a lot of thunder not lightning yeah something like that

a lot of voices this is a blast i never get to talk about bitcoin this much on my podcast well i feel you know uh we went through it we went through a time when i was learning so what i tell people to this day is you can you can literally start so small. Like, people think of, people know, a lot of people from the outside looking in don't understand the Satoshi. So they think Bitcoin, well, Bitcoin, you know, is 59,000 or whatever it is today. And you're like, no, no, no, you can go buy just a minuscule amount of Bitcoin. Get, you know, get an account on an exchange. Get yourself a wallet. Do not store, you know, you can start on, you can start on Coinbase, you can start on whatever. I would not recommend that you stay there.

You need to remove it from those. If you want to be independent, you need to get it off there. But to start, you know, just make a transaction. Buy $10, whatever. Send it to somebody. It's like anything, you just have to learn. But the more things that you do with it, the more you'll want to learn more. And the next thing you know, you'll have a moment, I don't know, what it is for anybody other than myself, but you'll have a moment where it clicks and then you you think, well, this is a way more efficient way to send and receive value. So much better. And then you start getting into these other ideas of economics that have not been taught in our schools. In fact, I think they've actively taught a different way of thinking about how the

economy works because the school system, which is basically telling you what the government wants you to know, they want you to think the government can print money forever and it's not going to hurt you and it's just the way that it is. And these magical wizards called the Federal Reserve that come down every once in a while and they determine what interest rates are. This is not, you know, away from the capitalist system. This is capitalism. When in reality, this is central planning, Soviet style like control of the money. And Bitcoin radically changes that. And suddenly we, if we were to move to a Bitcoin standard, now if the government wants to go to war and you don't want to pay for it, they, what it happens now is they don't tax you, they tax you some,

but really they just inflate away the money and they're taxing your bank account. If they have to use Bitcoin to pay soldiers and to buy arms and now all of a sudden they've got to convince you that this is a righteous war. So Bitcoin not only changes you and how you save, but it changes our whole governance structure in ways that I think thinking citizens would want. It gives people the power. If you want a, if you want a fair and legal voting system, put it on the blockchain. Yeah.

Have somebody have to sign it with a Satoshi for sure? Yeah. A lot of opportunities there. Yeah, is it Web 3.0 or 4.0? 4.0. Yeah. There's a lot of opportunities with it. That's for sure.

There's a lot of new stuff. that's going to come out, a lot of new opportunities, and I don't know where it all goes, but it's going to go some way. Yeah, and for a young person that's sitting there saying, I can't buy land and I can't buy a house because I have to have enough money to make it worthwhile, this is the best thing you can do is start saving there. Don't save in a savings account. Try and save in Bitcoin and watch what happens. Well, I think I got all my words out. Did you get all your words out? Well, probably not, but that's all right. I never do. This is fantastic. I love this. So to backtrack,

How do people get a whole? How do people find you? That's where you at on social and all that. The best place to find me is on X at Vance Crow, Crow with an E. And then if you're interested in having me record your family history, you can do it in person in St. Louis, which is a real experience that we give people. They come away feeling great. Or you can do it online. It's legacy interviews.com and book it out. Yeah, absolutely. Where are you going to speak? I am headed up. I am headed up. up first to Hertz Farm Management and I'm going to give a talk on giving talks there. And then after that, I'm headed to Zach Smith is putting on his farm weird field day. This is where he's doing inter-relay cropping. He does pastures in between 12 rows of crops where he runs a little barn that moves on

its own where he's got goats, pigs, chickens, and then they go down the pasture and then they turn them around and move them down another row of the pasture. And then next year, the corn gets planted there and the pasture gets planted in between it. It's an amazing system and he's a really neat guy. I think we just found our next episode like that. Yeah, that would be an interesting conversation for sure. I'd love to see how that works. Well, we truly appreciate you stopping by. Great conversation. Great conversation. It was. This was a blast, guys. You guys, I don't know where you came from. I started seeing your YouTube shorts. And I was like, who are? are these guys. And then I ran into you at the farm for profit thing. It's just been a great way.

The internet brings people together. It does. Absolutely. It's been great. It's awesome. We love talking Bitcoin. We love talking farming. We love talking legacy. So it was a perfect episode. Vance, we appreciate you coming. Guys, if you got any value from the show, share it out with who you know. Leave review on Spotify or Apple. And we'll see you guys back here next week for another episode.