Danny Jones Podcast - #94 - Former 'Bath Salts' Trafficker | Justin Smith

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Justin Smith was sentenced to 12 years in prison for running the biggest bath salts trafficking ring in Florida. According to court documents, in 2011, Smith began purchasing Methylone, a club drug often referred to as “Molly,” in bulk from a source in China. Justin has since turned his life around and developed Contractor Plus, an app for contractors that skyrockets productivity and profitability. https://www.contractorplus.app Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for coming on, Justin. Thanks for having me. In Florida. Where are you, where do you live now? I live in Ohio right now. Okay. So basically, I want to just introduce your story real quick and then you can, you can elaborate. But basically you were sentenced to 12 years in prison for trafficking bath salts from China, right?

You can call it bath salts. So, you know, we had a variety of chemicals, everything from JWH-18 to methalone. That's really what got us. on the feds radar. A little bit closer. What really got us on the DEA's radar was methalone, which is synthetic MDMA. And, you know, a lot of people, partygoers take it and it makes them feel good. A lot of people call it bath salts. Is that what the news calls bath salts? Is the same thing? Yeah, it can be a variety of chemicals. A lot of people would blend, like that guy in Miami that was eating people's faces off. Yeah. I was like, what, 10 years ago. Was that the

same shit that you were selling? It was like five different chemicals blended in one, you know. Okay. So, experimental, They call them research chemicals, actually. Oh, really? Research chemicals. But, but yeah. And you actually, you met Matt Cox in prison, too. You were in the same prison as Matt Cox.

So in prison, I didn't meet him, but when I met him in person, and we realized we were at the same facility, I recalled looking out the door and B unit and seeing him be aligning it for the library. So he's always like in the front of the pack just going as fast as he possibly can because the library only holds like 100 people. Just a little man running? You can't miss it. Very memorable. That's hilarious.

But you never actually talked to him when you were in there. In prison, I never talked to the guy. Wow. Never. We have some mutual friends. Donovan Davis. Yeah, yeah. He wrote his story.

Who else? He knows Frank Venice, big real estate guy here in Florida, commercial real estate guy. He got like 15 years for running some kind of like retail wholesale scheme. Of course, I believe the guy's innocent, just like Donovan, actually. Pretty wild. Yeah. but yeah. Never met him in prison.

What about, did you ever meet Frank Amadeo? I didn't meet Frank Amadeo, but very popular. His name floated around the compound, very known guy. Yeah, I was talking to him a little bit before he got out. I've been trying to keep in touch with him, but. Okay, so for the sake of the story, can you sort of like explain how this whole thing began with you distributing this shit and eventually getting busted?

Sure. So, you know, I moved to Orlando in 2004 to go to college. After college, I started working a real estate company. We were doing really well. And then I saw an opportunity. I was actually playing poker one day. And this guy slid a little packet across the day. We said, what is this?

If you can figure out what this is, we can make a lot of money. What do you mean he was like trying it? No, he actually owned head shops. And so they sold these products in their stores. And he didn't understand. And he didn't really know what they were putting on the Damiana and marshmallow, the loose leaf that was making people high. It was given at the time, JWH18 gave, it literally was like a weed high. So it wasn't crazy.

Now when you hear K2, like run for the hills because that stuff is making people fall up on the floor. Dangerous stuff. And I've seen it with my own eyes. Not cool. But back then, before they kept modifying, you know, what they do is they move it like one carbon molecule to the left or whatever. And then they just call it something else. And now they've got all kinds of chemicals. I don't even know what they're currently selling the cannabinoids.

But they don't produce a cannabis like I. Now they're more like a tryptamine or something like it's like it's literally like they went into another universe. So not cannabis. So that's what you were trying to basically do is just mimic cannabis. Yeah. Because obviously it wasn't legal back. Right. So, you know, they had a line.

That was their bread and butter at the head shops when it was legal. when they could buy this stuff. It was never scheduled. See, it wasn't scheduled at the time. It was covered under the Federal Analog Act, though. In the Federal Analog Act, see, in the Fed's, you have the Controlled Substances Act, which controls everything, category 1 through 4 or whatever, of all of the listed controlled substances. But then they've also got what's called the Federal Analog Act.

The Federal Analog Act states that any substance that produces a similar or like mind-altering effect, they can charge you with the nearest related substance. So even though that's not the substance you have, that's what they're going to charge you with. Because it produces a similar effect. And probably rightfully so. I mean, some of these experimental drugs people are misusing and they're extremely dangerous. But where they could just go get the real thing and know their proper dosage

and, you know, if they like using drugs for recreational purposes, I believe that's on them. Like me personally, my beliefs are the government. shouldn't really have a whole lot to say with what we can buy, sell, consumer, possess. If you like to get high, get high. So, you know, I justify that. My libertarian viewpoints, and I justify what I was doing, I disconnected, I disassociated with me enabling people and potentially putting people in harm's way.

I think being in prison, I kind of connected those dots a little better. Like, I realized, like, hey, I don't want to be part of the problem. I want to be part of the solution. And money isn't what, money isn't what, you can't buy happiness. You know, I think a study shows up to like $80,000 a year or something. Your happiness can increase as you make more money. But after that, the law of diminishing returns kicks in. And you just, it doesn't help.

If anything, it further complicates things and it makes your life crazy. So what brings happiness to me, what brings joy to me in my life, I've realized it's helping people. If I can create something that helps people and adds value to people's lives, then I feel better about myself. It isn't about how much money's in my wallet or my bank account. It's about what I'm contributing, what I'm helping, how I'm helping. Right. I mean, now you say that after prison.

I mean. But what? So, so, when you were playing poker and your buddy slid this little baggy of K2 to you, what happened after that? This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Blue Chew. It's good for her. And it's even better for. you. Blue Chew is a cheat code for your dick because no one likes a little limp noodle dick.

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That's B-L-U-E-C-H-E-W.com. promo code Concrete, K-O-N-C-R-E-T-E to receive your first month free. So I sent it to a lab in Texas. I had an analyzed and it came back as JWH. And JWH is an analog. It's a synthetic cannabinoid. At the time, it was not scheduled. And then I started looking for suppliers.

And in China, I found a whole host of suppliers. I ended up going with a company called CansoTech. Excuse me. Canso Tech Private Limited in Jainsu, China. And I was getting this stuff for like $1,200 bucks a kilogram. Wait, wait, wait, how do you go? How do you, I feel like you, you're progressing down this path way too fat. Like, what were you doing prior to this?

How are you making money? What were you doing? I was running a property management company. Okay. I was making a buck 20 a year. I was doing good. You know, I have a college degree. I was doing good.

But at the time, like, I see a way to make money and the entrepreneur me is just, like, figure out how to do it. I wasn't thinking about the repercussions. I wasn't thinking about who it might hurt. I wasn't thinking about the consequences, positive or negative. I was just thinking about how much money can we make and how fast. You knew that you could sell this stuff to head shops. Right.

And people that were producing the products selling it to head shops. Like I have a buddy in the Fort Lauderdale area, won't say any names, but was, you know, selling millions of units. So you knew somebody who was already doing it. And you wanted to duplicate what he was doing. I didn't just want to duplicate it. I wanted to get myself in the middle between me and the people that were producing it.

And I wanted to become the largest importer, period. I wanted to find a way to position myself where we were bringing the largest amount possible into the country and reselling it to people who were producing the products. And I was pretty successful at doing that. I negotiated a consignment relationship. We were bringing in hundreds of kilos a month. So a very large quantity of this stuff. So, okay. So once you, how did you find somebody in China with, and how did you know what you were looking for?

Google? You just Google the ingredients of this stuff, and then you found out the biggest manufacturer of the... Right, so I searched the chemical. When I found out what the chemical was, then I searched it, and I started looking for suppliers, and I saw, like, I think read it. I just read and read and read. And I found some people that said, hey, you can order from this lab.

You can order from this lab. And I just went out... I think the very first time I placed an order, I just sent a Western Union. And, you know, that got more sophisticated. When you're sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to China, you can't just keep sending money through Western Union and MoneyGram. So we started using Bitcoin.

We started trying to discuss, we started using PGP, pretty good privacy, PGP encryption. So between all of the communication between me and the suppliers in China was encrypted. But the problem is, and all of your emails are archived. Everything in Gmail is archived. It goes all the way back. The NSA has a copy of it. I promise you they do. any of the federal agencies, the Alphabet soup agencies can access it, the DHS, the DEA, the FBI.

Once they get a Title III, once they conjure a grand jury, and they bring an indictment against you, all of that is like public information to them. They can see it all. So even if you go through and delete a message on Facebook or something, it's not deleted. Trust me, it's not deleted. It's archived in NSA servers. As well as text messages too, probably. Everything.

I think it's called Prism. So you have to look it up. but the federal government, the Pentagon and the DHS, and they connected all together through this back office system. It's called PRISM. And what it is, it's like we're each a node in like a mesh topology. So we're all connected, just like every computer, every device on the Internet is all connected.

We're all connected in this system in PRISM. So they can pull me up, Justin Smith. Now it pulls it up on the map. And now that you and I have set at this table together, now there's a line drawn from me to you. So they know that we're setting in the same room together. Wow. You know, it's, I don't know how sophisticated the AI is, but I'm sure it's the best technology on Earth.

Right. But. So you, you were cognizant of this and you went the extra step to make sure all your communication with this company in China was super encrypted. As good as we could. But the problem is, is those emails, those first few emails, I think it was three emails before we started encrypting, was enough to bring an indictment against me. Those three emails, when they slid them across the table, I had every intention on taking it to trial. But when they slid those emails across the table and they said, do you have these substances and how much are they?

They responded with the price list. And then I said, this is the one we want. That's all they needed. And then they had an email with the Western Union confirmation. Proof that I ordered it. So if I went before a jury with that proof, they didn't need anybody to testify against me. They didn't need anything else.

They had everything they needed in the first few emails. So what good is encrypting everything else? if the first three, you know what I mean, gave it away. So, um, fuck, man. Yeah, man. Hindsight's 2020, but honestly, I don't regret going down the path that I went down. It's tough now like it is. Like getting out, you know, obviously I have, we have, I have my own company and we're doing good.

But the first year or so reintegrating into society after you're incarcerated is difficult. You know, you have to play by the rules. You're not technically allowed to own your own business or at least make money from it. There's all kinds of rules. After you found the company in China that you wanted to do business with, how much were you buying with them? What kind of deal did you do with them? So it started slow.

I think I ordered a kilogram, probably or maybe 500 grams. How much was that? A thousand bucks. Oh, wow. Yeah, it wasn't much. I think the kilogram we were paying 1,500 for, but when I bought 100 of them, I would get $1,200. I think the cheapest we ever got it was.

It was like 1,100. Okay. So, you know, and the chemicals quickly changed. So China isn't like the United States. In the United States, like, we find out, like, something's going to be scheduled or something's, you know, undergoing testing right now. They're determining whether or not they're going to bring it on the schedule, how it's going to be scheduled, what the potency is.

The DEA toxicology report comes back and says it's like equivalent to this amount of marijuana or whatever. It's pretty crazy how they do that, actually. But in China, it's black and white. It's like it's either illegal or it's not. There's no gray area. And they give their manufacturers a heads up. They're like, look, whatever you got of this chemical, liquidate it, get rid of it, or destroy it.

Because after this date, which I think it's usually like January 1st, if you get caught with it, you're going to prison. So, you know, their suppliers in China know that and they work around it. So when something's coming up, they know it's going to be scheduled. They just change the chemical a little bit where it still produces a similar effect. but now it's technically legally a different chemical. So, or chemically, a different chemical. So that's how they skirt the wall there. And, you know, is it really skirting the law?

I don't know. I think they just haven't thought it through as much as we have. In the United States, if it produces a similar, like, mind-altering effect, it doesn't matter if it's illegal or not. If you get caught with a substance, you're going to prison. So very different. So what was the first substances that you were buying? JWH-18.

J-W-H-18. And you were buying that. for like $1,100 a kilo. Yep. 15, 15, and then it got cheaper. And then what? You started selling it to who? Started selling it to people who were producing, producing the products.

Okay. And started producing our own brand called Cush. We actually had the first menthol variety called Cush Ice. And we were selling thousands, tens of thousands of units. So we sold them little plastic vials all over Florida. And they got, it's crazy how much, how much. We sold them for a dollar apiece on consignment. And one gram of pure J-DVs.

WH 18 would produce 10 grams of smokable product. So pretty crazy. How much came in a little vial? One gram. One gram. One gram. A dollar apiece. Well, we sold it for a dollar a piece. The stores are selling it for $20, $25.

So they're making a crazy markup. Well, see, that's how we got in by low-balling people. K-2 was charging $5, $6 a unit, and we're selling it for a dollar. On consignment. So we're going to check net 30. we're not getting paid the day they get it we're getting paid 30 days from then so how long it it'd take before you started making like crazy money uh about a year six months to a year six months we were making three to five thousand a month wasn't crazy after a year we were making like man we had

$20,000 days it was I remember one day we did almost 100 grand and I remember thinking like wow like we made it this is the biggest payday I've ever had and the amount of money that was coming in it was impossible to say no, and I knew that we were playing with fire. At that point, I already knew. It was like a feeling, man. Your intuition will never lie to you. And the problem is, all these temptations, you know what I mean? The lifestyle, being able to fly to Vegas and rent helicopters and do whatever and not think about the price tag.

That is so alarming that when you're caught in the mix, or at least I can use eye statements. When I was caught in the mix, I couldn't say no. you know and now having been through what i've been through it's a totally different story of course i would say no but um so when you say a hundred thousand dollar days is that like like revenue or is that profit revenue yeah yeah that's insane that's a crazy amount of money man yeah we're paying and how old were you uh 25 26 wow pretty crazy yeah so so you were making a shitload of money and you started getting worried like this can go south very quickly i remember one day one day of all places. I was sitting on a toilet and I had this overwhelming sense it just came

over me and I was like, I just felt flushed. Like I realized like I was like, if I don't stop doing this, there's going to be a problem. You know, I just, I don't know. Like, I'm not clear of when or anything. I just, I just knew that like I was, I was operating in gray area. We got multiple letters from the FDA. So the FDA sent us letter saying, stop selling this product or we can bring criminal action against you. And I would rip them up and throw them in the trash. You know, I went and talked to a lawyer and I was like, can they really do this? And this lawyer was not a federal lawyer.

But he's like, no, as long as it's not scheduled, you're good. If it's not like an illegal ban substance, all I can do is threaten you. And it wasn't an illegal ban substance. It wasn't at the time, no. It wasn't. But, you know, they would tell us like it's going to be scheduled. People are misusing this. Their letter would say, like, people are consuming this as a drug.

It produces undesirable effects. it's dangerous, stop selling it. So the FDA will send you warnings. They'll tell you stop selling the product. The DEA doesn't send warnings. The DEA kicks in your door. But they sent letters, though. Those are kind of like warnings?

The FDA, yeah. I mean, they all work together. Yeah, the Food and Drug Administration, the DEA, they all work together. Did you hear any stories back then, like when you were selling it, of people doing fucked up shit, like eating people's faces off? I mean, like the one in the news, but me personally, I never experienced anything like that. You know, I think that's probably a mixture.

Did you try it? Yeah. Did you? Yeah, I tried it. What was it like? Like weed. Just like smoking weed? It was like smoking weed.

Wow. I mean, back in the JWH 18 days, I remember, I won't say, I can't say who it is, but they came to visit me from Philadelphia. And I got some of this in and I'd never tried it. And I was like, you know, people say it's good. Let's try it. And we packed a bowl and we smoked. it and we just, we watched a movie that they had produced.

They produced the movie and we all got high before we watched the movie and it was like a weed high and it was actually enjoyable. But those chemicals, trust me, do not use spice, K2, whatever. Today, it's not the same thing. So I don't know what the, I'm sure they've changed a thousand times since then, but they're in prison, it's like an epidemic. Screw coronavirus. Like the K2 problem in prison is.

insane. Every day someone is falling out. They're swimming on the concrete. They're screaming Jesus. They see, it's making them see things. It's like an LSD trip. Why is it so different now? Because they keep changing the chemical and it's all experimental. Like these drugs have never existed. So, you know, they just keep changing it and they don't know how it's going to interact with your cannabinoid receptors. Excuse me. If that's even what it's interacting with at this point, I'm convinced that it's not even a cannibinoid, like, seeing the way people react to this stuff? Yeah. No.

But you never saw anybody react like that when you were made, when you were selling it. No, definitely. Never. No, you know, that's, and that goes back to like my libertarian viewpoints. I see prohibition as the problem. Like, if you make weed illegal, all right? And then to the point where people feel like they have to produce a chemical to circumvent drug testing, they can't just smoke a plant, which grows from the ground.

You know, that's why this stuff. all came about. It would have never existed if Prohibition wasn't here. If weed was legal, you would not have been in business. That's true, too. That's very true. That's very true. Wild. So how

long did this last when you were making $20,000 a day? About a year. So what happened was there was another product on the shelves, and it came in a little pack of two little red pills. It had a, looked like the Walmart smiley face. And happy time pills. Some people, some of them just

at happy times. Mr. Happy, Mr. Nice Guy. Is that the same stuff? Well, Mr. Nice Guy, K2, happy, methylone knockoff Molly. Okay. So that's when the DEA. The DEA didn't ever do anything.

As far as I know, their investigation didn't even involve the JWH-18. FDA didn't like the synthetic cannabinoids. DEA drew the line in the sand at Molly. So when they see, you know, people are taking this club drug, people overdose on this stuff this is dangerous the DEA gets involved and that's when that's when we we experienced the problems so you know we got indicted on bk MDMA methalone that is what the

DEA indicted us on that is like synthetic molly or like you said bath salts you know people call it whatever so up until the point you got indicted like what what was the process like to where you first realized like shit we might be in some shit to the point where you finally got indicted. Like what was it was it was instantaneous? Does it happen like the next day? It was instantaneous but you know I did have my intuition like I remember I got an email from the supplier that asked for a phone number wanted to thought and I was like wait a minute did somehow did the federal government and like somehow crack their PGP and like this just

seems fishy but it was such a big order. It was like 300 kilos. So it was such a big order that even though it seemed fishy. I took the bait. So definitely was baited. At the time I wanted to think, I was sitting in county jail and I'm thinking like, was I honeypotted? Like did somehow the federal government set up a honeypot in China? Like it just seemed weird how, you know, how it all came about. Did you get some prostitutes in China? No, no. Isn't that what a honey pot is when they try to get some hot chick to like what I meant by that is like they set up like a sting operation or a honeypot.

where they would like, they facilitate the drug trade. And so the government actually sets up an offshore entity, facilitates the drug trade, let you get big so that they can knock your head off once you get to the point where you're on their radar. Oh, okay. I thought a honey, maybe I'm thinking of a honey trap.

Maybe there's a difference. Yeah, probably. So. Did you actually go to China to check out this company? No, no. You never went there. Nope. Wow.

Nope. It wasn't necessary. So what was it like the day that you found out you were fucked? Oh, size 12 military boot on the side of your head, fully automatic weapons in your face. How did they walk me through that day? They laying in bed. They kicked the door in. Like early in the morning, late at night?

Midday was like, right. It was like 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock in the morning. And you're in Orlando? In Orlando. They kicked the door in. People all over the lawn. I mean, all up the street. They had, I mean, it was just crazy.

People with video cameras. There's no warning. They don't knock. You know, they just kick the door in. They come in with guns from all angles. What? They throw you on the ground. They bust all your doors.

They rip doors off the hinges. They destroy the place. And they hold you to the ground with a, you know, a huge military boot until they zip tie your hands and then throw you in the back of a dog catcher and take you in for questioning. Fuck. They beat you up a little bit when they did that? No, I mean, no. That's good.

Well, besides the guy's boot on your head. They're not gentle. But, you know, the way they see it and the way, if you read that article at the Department of Justice, they paint me like I'm some Al Chapo. Then you know what's funny is the girl I'm dating right now, she has a lot of law enforcement in her family. And her family is adamant on her not dating me. Really? They think I'm some big, dangerous drug trafficker.

one of her brother-in-law's said if you choose this lifestyle, like what does that mean? If you choose this lifestyle, we're disowning you. You're not allowed to see your niece and nephew anymore. You're not welcome at our house. And she says, but he's not trafficking drugs. He has an app. It's a C corporation in Delaware. He has employees.

He has revenue. It's all done legally. And he said, well, you know, if he was doing like hard physical labor, like, I just don't believe it. He thinks that Contractor Plus is some way for me to long. under drug money or wash drug money. I would never touch drugs again. I don't care to use them. I don't care to sell them.

But convincing someone who is in that line of work of that is difficult, you know? Yeah. Matt talks a lot about his troubles trying to make friends and meet new people and people judged him for his past. Dude, it's hard. Have you ever seen Orange is the New Black? Yeah. I saw like the first two seasons.

The last season is actually really important because it shows Piper's reintegration into society. It shows her interaction with her interaction with her. probation officer. It shows the struggle she has finding employment, maintaining employment. Dude, I never thought it would be a problem. As soon as I got, I had an internship in college at 111 records. As soon as I completed, as soon as I got my degree, I applied for one job. And I got that job as a web designer, a web developer, which is not what I went to school for. So I got that job. Within six months, I'm running that business and another business owned by that guy. another six months later, I'm given equity,

I'm promoted to vice president. I'm running the whole business. And I ran that business for almost seven years. Yeah. So finding employment has never been a struggle for me. I started my first business at 13. Before I ever went to college, I started working as an e-commerce director.

I think I was 17 years old, 18 years old in Pittsburgh at action fanatics. And so they're like a paintball district. beater. Jeff Lizick owned that company. Brilliant man, by the way. He owns a marketing company now in Pittsburgh, and he's been buying up smaller marketing companies. He's been kind of like a mentor to me. He believed in me when I was 17 years old. I remember I got a call from him. And he, I was working, I was stocking shelves at Office Max. And he said, do you know who I am? And I said, no. And he said, well, where are you at right now? And I told him, he laughed. And he was like, dude, he was like, I saw the website you built for the paintball team. And, and he said, well, he said, well, where are you at? And

Columbus and he said it was an indoor paintball field he said I saw the website that you built and it was just immaculate it was awesome dude and I need you to come to Pittsburgh how quick can you come to Pittsburgh I think he gave me like 25 bucks an hour you know that's that's pretty good pay for 17 year old kid hell yeah so I went to Pittsburgh I built their new website we migrated to an e-commerce platform called amphopia a couple months later that company our our main supplier key action sports in Sewell, New Jersey, owned by a guy named Gino Post-Arivo, one of the biggest, the biggest brand in the sport of paintball. They offered, they called Jeff and said,

who built your new website? And so they called Jeff and they told him to come to Sewell, New Jersey, and to brain me. So I go to Pittsburgh, get in a car with Jeff, and we drive across the state of Pennsylvania, and they pulled us in the conference room separately, first together and then separately, and then separately, then they made job offers. And because of my age, they offer me, I think, $35,000 a year.

And I told them no. I said, you know, my age has nothing to do with it. I'm making more money than that right now. Right. So, but you're going to have 10 people working for you. You know, this is just a starting pay. They tried to sell me on the opportunity. And I said, well, I haven't even went to college yet.

You know, I want to go to college. And Jeff, they offered him like $185 a year and like a 10-year contract. He told him no as well. So, um, You know, just pretty interesting. At that point, I said, it was a pivotal moment. I said, you know what, I'm going to college. I want to go to full sale.

Going to college in Orlando, and I up and moved to Orlando. And that's when life began. Pretty crazy. What did you get your degree in? Music business. Have you paid off your tuition yet? Absolutely not. It's so crazy, dude.

I think I told you this already, but I've had probably like five or six people on here that went to full sale. No one's paid off their tuition yet. Well, it's an expensive school. I think, you know, for the bachelor's degree, you can't work where you go to that school because they have a split schedule where you go from like 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. And then you have three or four hours off and then you come back for another four hours for your live labs. So it's impossible to maintain employment. Unless you're doing your own thing on the internet or something as a freelancer, you couldn't work and go to full sale. So a lot of people, unless you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you have to take out student loans and for your living expenses as well.

And that's what I did. So I think I have $120,000 in student loans. And I paid on that for years, but it's like a $1,200 payment was just paying the interest. So pretty wild. How much is the interest on that loan? I don't know. I don't know what it is. I think it was a 12% interest.

How much do you owe now? Well, so while I was incarcerated, a lot of those loans were charged off. And I've disputed and disputed and disputed. I've actually got them all deleted off the credit. So all three credit bureaus, there's no student loans. There's no student loans. Oh, that's nice. COVID, I think, was a blessing because people were working remotely.

I don't know if that's why they got deleted, but I know that I was persistent. I disputed every month, and eventually things just went away. And now my credit's trending towards 800. Hell yeah. I actually started fixing my credit from federal prison. Did you really? I started making steps like setting up credit builder accounts. I don't know if I should say that.

So, you know, trying to make the right steps like I set up. a credit builder account like self.com or self.inc, I think is what it is. You know, you set up a, it's like a loan. It's a, it's a CD. Every month you put 150 bucks into it. And then after a year, it unlocks you get the money back or you can roll it over into a prepaid card. All of that payment activity goes to build your credit profile. So, you know, part of it was understanding what really contributed to building credit, what it meant. Because, you know, negative items is one thing. Having positive history is another. and both things are equally as important. So I read books on it and multiple books and I learned what I needed to do to get my credit looking right and it worked. And, you know, and it's not hard. It's just a matter of taking the time to do it. Yeah. And it's the smartest thing you could do because everything is dependent on your credit,

whether you're going to buy a place and you want a low interest rate on a mortgage or, you know, you're going to buy a car. That one point, you know, 1% in interest makes a big difference in your payment. Oh, hell yeah. So having a good credit rating is important, especially as a felon, because that's now as a felon, most HOA's in the country, I can't live in. You know, they don't want me. I'm undesirable now. There's countries I can't travel to, you know, Australia. It's a no-go zone.

I think even Canada, I can't go to. Yeah. So, you know, I'm marked for life in that regard. Can never own a firearm again? There's a lot of things that I can't do. I can apply to, like, vote again. I don't vote, don't care about voting. But pretty much once you go down that path and once you make that mistake,

your prison sentence is just the start of it and never really ends. Right when I got out, I had a great job interview, more than qualified. It was a marketing director position in Columbus, Ohio, paid $160,000 a year. I was hands down the best person for the job. I went through the first interview. They loved me. Went through the second interview with the executives. They loved me.

Got through the third interview. They already made a contingent job offer. With HR, they were vetting me, running me through the background check. I said, I think at this time I should give you full disclosure. I just got out of federal prison. Whoa, wait a minute. Pump the brakes. We can't hire you.

And it just doesn't make any sense to me. You like the person. You know that their portfolio speaks for themselves. You know that they can do what you need done properly. You know that they meet your culture demands. Like they're going to be a good fit for your company. and you find out that they went to prison for drug trafficking and get out of our office. Is that what your charge was, drug trafficking?

Yep. Drug trafficking conspiracy. What was the actual charge, like verbatim? Drug trafficking conspiracy. Okay. Yeah, that's what they charge you with. Did they get you with like an amount or anything? Yeah, 100. They just threw a number out there, 100 kilograms. A hundred kilograms.

So they see. What did they call it? Methylone, BK-Mdmdm. So they actually seized 200 and, or 300, I forget, 284 kilos, I think, in the mail. So that's what they actually seized in one shipment. And it was all going to addresses that were linked to me. And so that was a talk, make sure you're talking about, yeah.

So, you know, that's how they say the investigation culminated was through that seizure. Of course, it didn't. It started way before that. But that's the gist of it. So what happened after they knocked your door down, put the zip ties around your legs and your wrists and threw you in the back of the paddy. Just your wrist. They just throw them around the wrist.

Yeah, so they take you to a holding cell downtown. It's in the courthouse. They ask you questions. They try to scare you. They, you know, they talk a lot of crap. They say they got you dead to right. try to convince you to tell them something. Of course, if you're smart, you'll keep your mouth shut. What did you do? I kept my mouth shut. I demanded to speak to my lawyer first. At the time,

my lawyer wasn't a federal lawyer. So he'd never represented a federal client. So he, when I talked to him, he said, listen, man, this is way over my head. He said, I can refer you to somebody who can help you. And he referred me to Markna Jame. And this guy charged me $30,000. Just as a consult. That cheap. You know, if you actually go to trial, like Donovan Davis went to trial, I think he had two lawyers and he ended up spending over a million dollars on his legal defense. So you still had access to your money? Well, yeah. So not all of my money. They didn't seize your bank accounts or anything. No, they did. So the Wells Fargo account, they closed it down. I couldn't access it anymore. They seized a lot of cash from the business and from my personal property.

They seized all of my assets, my computers, my electronics. They took everything. So vehicles, they took it all. But not all of my income was generated illegitimately. You know, I'm still making money legally. I have clients. I had a client in Punta Gorda, a doctor. I was 60 grand a year.

I had a client. Doing what? Web development. Web development, video production. Right. Different marketing services. And I had another client. It was like a lifestyle coach.

So I had revenue coming in that was legal. They couldn't touch that. And I also had Serpify. So, you know, at the time making money legitimately, the feds can't touch your money that you're making legitimately. They can only take what they can prove you're not supposed to have by their, you know. So, you're saying. sitting in the cell, they're trying to scare the shit out of you, trying to get you to confess

everything, and you call your lawyer. And what did he say? Like, what were you looking at? So he said that I was looking at five years. He said, look, he said, if you, he said, before you say anything, before we do anything, I need to see the evidence they have against you. I need to know whether or not. He said, I can't tell you what to do. I can't tell you to go to trial or not go to trial. That's going to be your decision. But I can tell you what I would do if I was in your shoes. I could tell you what I would do based on the evidence they have against me and the time that you're facing. When it all came down, he looked at everything and he said, well, you know, loosely scheduled substance. It's not, you know, it's not like crack cocaine or something with a stiff sentence.

He said, they're going to base it on the marijuana equivalency table. They do this ratio adjustment based on the, based on the quantity. And you know, they did that in our case, too. So I was since the 151 months, but then when the DEA toxicology report came back that showed our substance was actually less than half as potent as what they initially thought it was, they had to do a three or four level departure based on that equivalency, based on that rate, based on what their toxicology report showed it as. So that, of course, helped. So they were charging you based on, because it was the closest to weed, right? So they were saying you have this X amount of kilo, what was it, 100?

100 kilos. They were saying, okay, we're going to, since we don't really have a crime that fits this exact drug, we're just going to give you whatever the crime would be for 100 kilos of weed. No. So initially they were saying that one gram of what we had was equivalent to 500 grams of marijuana. Oh, got it. So they do this. I don't know how they get the ratio down, but they do this weird math.

They convert everything to marijuana. Okay. And then they convert it into time based on marijuana. Okay. I don't know how they're going to do that when weed is fully legal, which I presume under this administration it should be happening soon. And you said they do that with all drugs? They do that with all kinds of shit.

They just figure out what it's the closest to? They do with some sort of math equation. They convert it to marijuana. And then they sentence you based on that conversion. That's so fucking crazy. It doesn't make any sense. In 1984, I believe, they abolished federal parole. So before that, you could parole out of early.

on good behavior. That same time, that was during the Reagan administration, they instated the United States Sentencing Commission. The United States Sentencing Commission replaced federal parole. And what they did was they had like, it's like a numbered system. So there's like a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. And on the vertical axis, it's like one through 40 or something like that. And then on the horizontal axis, it's based on your criminal history.

So if you have priors, if you've been in trouble before, than every prior you have, just move yourself one row to the right. Got it. And then based on the quantity that you have, or based on that conversion to marijuana, they decide where you belong on that vertical axis. And then wherever that positions you, they circle that number, that's how much time you're getting. And the judge has his hands tied.

There's not a whole lot of discretion that the judges really have in sentencing. They can't say, you know, well, you're supposed to get 10 years, but I'm only going to give you five. Now you can sign a conditional plea agreement. I don't think the feds like to do that, but I have heard of it. I've heard of, especially up north people get it a lot. You know, they'll say, look, we have,

we caught you with a gun, we caught you with 10 kilos. If you take a guilty plea today, we won't indict your mom, we won't indict your sister. We will let you plea to five years. We're just going to sentence you to five years. So then people are like, well, heck yeah, I'm going to do this because I'm facing 20. So where do I sign?

Or they get you to, like, rat out people that are close to you. Right, and then they'll take time off your sentence for that as well. Right. So. Which is what Matt Cox did. What's that? Cut everybody's throat around him just to get... Matt Cox did.

Cut down his own sentence, yeah. Oh, I didn't hear anything about that. Oh, yeah, he's open about it. He's proud of it. Really? Yeah. A lot of, he gets a lot of flack online for it, though. For cutting people down.

Yeah, he even, he talks about how he met a guy walking the yard. A guy who he became friends with who basically told Matt where he hit a bunch of his money. And Matt immediately went to... To get the money? He told somebody. Hey, I know where this guy's money is if you cut some time off my... But Matt got 26 years. Right.

He got 26. I think he only did 12. Oh, that's still a long time. Yeah. That's a really long time. But he found people to, he found, met people in there and found out their secrets and then told on them to get time off. his own sentence. In prison. In prison. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's crazy. He talks about it on the podcast. He's not, ashamed of it. I didn't watch the whole episode. I watched maybe five minutes of it. I mean,

he's done multiple episodes. It'd be hard to it. Yeah. Okay. But, um, check it out. Well, I met, yeah, his whole thing is. The first time, what, a month ago. I thought he was a great stand-up guy. Actually, we had a good day together. Yeah. A lot of fun together. It was a great a lot of fun together. It was a great time you ever talked to him. The first time you ever talked to him? The first time in person I've ever done. Really? Yep. Pretty great. Did he recognize you? No, he didn't. Well, when he first saw me, he looked at me. He's like, you look familiar.

But we didn't know each other. So I definitely remembered him. I mean, how can you forget Matt? Right. So especially when you have that image of him leaning forward with his bag, like a mesh bag with his books and everything in it, just speedwalking. I mean, you have to picture. There's like three buildings on the compound, A, B, and C. And they're all connected by sidewalks.

And then the library is all the way on the other side of the compound. You got the rec yard over here, and then you got the library over here. And everybody's waiting by the doors, just waiting for them to pop the doors for a five-minute or ten-minute move. A one-way move. So you move on that ten minutes, and after you get where you're going, you're stuck there for the next hour. Every hour on the hour, there's a move. And the people that would go to the library, they would rush to the library. So as soon as it's at capacity, they draw the line.

They say, yep, got to go. You've got a couple minutes. You just got to go to the rec yard for an hour. So he was always leading that pack, racing to the library. Was he? Always. So I, you know, that's where I remembered him. Pretty wild.

That's funny. Was he well known in there? Did people ever talk about him? So I didn't know him and I didn't hear about him there, but. You say he was running some real estate classes or something. He did. And there was actually another guy. I didn't take his class, but I took Dave Martinelli's class.

And I'm surprised I let this guy teach this class because he literally teaches you how to commit fraud and not get caught. Hell yeah. That's my kind of class. It was an interesting class And Dave was He was a hoot man Was he? He was fun to be around

But not smart No Definitely not smart Yeah Matt Matt's pretty sharp Very sharp guy And have you seen his art Oh yeah

I didn't even know he was an artist But I went to his Instagram page He's got a degree in fine arts Brilliant man Just brilliant I can't wait to see So on the way When he was seeing Brandon

Schlictor over at Investment Joy Brandon owns like laundromats And a bunch of real estate throughout central Ohio and has a pretty big following. He has like two million followers on TikTok and like a million or so on YouTube. So I guess he's doing a painting for Brandon, like standing in front of his laundromat and they're going to put it behind bulletproof glass on the wall. So I can't wait to see what this painting looks like. That's pretty cool. He's done some really cool stuff. Yeah, Matt's some really good stuff. Matt's an exceptional person.

He, the first time he did a podcast on here, it was like he had never done any kind of interviews or anything anywhere. And he was like, he reached out to me straight from the halfway house with a few emails. Wow. And it was just a random day where I had a guest had to reschedule and I needed to do a podcast that day. And I just randomly texted him like, hey, can you come today? I mean, he's got a heck of a story. And then it ended up having like millions of views instantly. It was insane.

Wow. And now he took the opportunity and ran with it. Like he's been doing commercials. people are flying him all over the place, paying him to come consult with them. And he's doing a lot of cool things, selling a lot of artwork. And it all started here.

Yeah, this was the first thing he ever did. Wow, how about that? And he really, he took the opportunity and fucking made something of it. I mean, that's what you have to do. You know, I'm happy the doors are starting to open for me as well. Yeah.

You know, I think realizing, I remember I would run every day. I would go out and run the track. And all I could think about, like, that was when I would decompress is working out. and all I could think about is like what I'm going to do in the first like three years getting in shape and and and you know reading a lot I read like 500 books. I would have never had the time to do that if I didn't go to prison. That's what I'm saying. I can't I don't regret going to prison at all. What was it like the day they told you? How much time did you get 12 years?

Yeah. You did every, you did all 12. No, no, I didn't. So I did just shy of, I did around six years. Six. Okay. So now, so three, four months after sentencing, I'm in prison. My lawyer calls me, sets up a call and he says, hey, listen. So the DEA toxicology report came back. you're the substance that how they sentenced you and how it's and how it really measures up they're saying it's 50%.

Again, how do they come up with these numbers man? So like do they have some guinea pig that they're testing the drugs with? I don't understand how they come up with it, but they said 50% as potent as the as they initially thought. So that justified a three level departure which took

almost three years off the sentence. So almost four it's like three and a half years. So that's big a big reduction and then when I was incarcerated they have what's called the ARDAP program and that stands for the residential drug and alcohol abuse treatment program that's a nine month program if you complete it in nine months it's residential so you move to a drug dorm you're with other people who have recognized that they have a substance abuse problem I was diagnosed with chronic marijuana abuse disorder so at the advice of my lawyer I made

sure that they knew that I had a marijuana abuse problem before I went to prison. Wow. And it works. It does work. And you know, it's funny, people pay these prison, these white color guys that are like terrified to death that go into prison. They got caught, stealing a couple million dollars. They go to prison. They're like, well, no, I'm going to do 10 years. This is not good. And their lawyer's like, don't worry, man. You're going to get a year off for this. You're going to get a year off for that. Don't worry, man. You're only going to do five. And they're not wrong. I mean, if you stay on good behavior, which is not hard to do in federal prison. It's not hard to not get in trouble in federal prison.

I mean, it's really not. So, I mean, you might get caught taking a banana out of the chow hall. They're going to make you push a pink lawnmower for an hour. You know, they're not going to throw you in the hole for that. You know, you mind your own business, stay in your own lane, work out, read, do things that are productive. A lot of great people in there. There's a lot of scumbags, too. But a lot of great people, it's not hard to mind your own business, man.

Be respectful, be polite. Don't put your feet in other people's chairs. I saw a guy almost get killed for using someone's chair as a footstool. That's not smart. Think about it. You wear those shoes in the bathroom everywhere you go. But people that are coming, these white-collar guys coming straight off the street, they're not thinking like that. You were in the low security, though, right?

And FCI, FCI Coleman. And then I went to Pensacola camp. So when I got to Pensacola, that's on a Navy base. That, I think, what's her name? I'm trying to think of her name. She wrote an article about Pensacola, like, in the late 90s, how it was like club fed. You have to Google it, Pensacola Club Fed. Pensacola Club Fed.

That's your cue, Aden. So, you know, she wrote this article, blew it up, said, these are the conditions. We had a movie theater, like a real movie theater, gourmet food. Back then, prison was not a bad experience. They even had co-ed federal prisons, wherever. men and women were together. You didn't wear jumpsuits or greens or khakis. You wore street clothes.

You know, it's, and even at Pensacola, they didn't have, the movie theater was no longer active due to asbestos or whatever. But, excuse me, we did have movie night. And pretty much every night, after 4 p.m., they play movies in the visiting room on a big screen.

And, you know, you can pop popcorn, bring food, do whatever. Really, man. And I have, hate saying this. Like I'm not trying to, it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing that without it, you know, there's no conjugal visits. So you take the conjugal, you got to give these guys something. Yeah. So, but, you know, the camaraderie and I made more friends at Pensacola than I probably made my entire life. Really? And, oh, man, my buddy Mark Fraser, he's over in Indian Harbor Beach.

He owned, like, pill mills. He, now, he refuses to call of that, but he owned multiple locations. they were pain clinics. They were bringing people in by the bus load. They were prescribing them, you know, they were selling oxycontin. And the DEA came in and said, you can't do that no more. You're going to prison. And, you know, I met multiple people that were in that line of work. I think he got five years.

I worked out with him every day. He was my workout partner. I'm hoping to see him while I'm here in Florida. Great dude. I mean, one of the best dudes I've ever met. And so, like, I really can't. What made him a great? dude if he was selling oxy cottons to loads of people well i know right but but look at what i was doing

yeah and and we i'm i'm curious what what makes him so great i mean he has integrity if he tells he's going to do something for you he does it he'd give you the shirt off of his back um he's not going to steal from you he's not going to lie to you uh i mean what really constitutes what really makes someone a good person you know what i mean is it a a mistake that they made or the wrong path that they took in life the wrong turn, you know, we're all capable to make mistakes. And I think most people have probably done something in their life that they could have went to jail for.

I think there's a book called like three felonies a day. It talks about how even a federal judge is committing three felonies a day and doesn't even know it. So, I mean, there's, what, 200,000 laws in this country? It's just ridiculous. I mean, if you distill all those laws down, don't hurt

people and don't take their shit. It's as simple as that. Why do you have to pervert justice? Why do you have to confuse things. You know, why do you have to create all these thousands of laws? It's pointless. Don't hurt people, man. Don't hurt people.

And, you know, and that's where in the ARDAT program, which I'm so, that's where I'm at Mark, in the ARDAT program, I'm so grateful that I had an opportunity. Now, of course, I took this program to get a year off my sentence. That's why I took it. That's why everybody takes it. Right. But in the program, what it really does, it's based on CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. And it helps us connect the dots between activating events, between something happening and the way we feel.

The idea is that there's something that happens in the middle of those two things. And in the middle of those two things is our cognitions. It's our thinking. And we think in patterns. So when we develop a thinking pattern, these patterns persist. That's what patterns do. So they can- Pull that thing in front of you a little bit more.

My bad. If you want to be over there, you can pull it. So these patterns persist. and they wreck havoc in our lives. And the thing is, it's so easy to point a finger and be like, well, you made me feel this way or you did this and you did that and it made me feel this way. But the thing is, all we're doing is pushing the blame. When in reality, it's not what someone else did that made me feel the way I feel.

It's what I thought about what they did that made me feel the way I feel. The meaning you put to it. Right. But the idea is, you know, we have 70,000 cognitions a day. And most of those are irrational, like 80% of those are totally. irrational. Really? Most of our thinking is irrational. Right. So now we think

about it. Hopefully before we get down to the feelings, the actions, and the outcome, before we act or respond, we think about it and we do the right thing. So by evaluating the way I'm thinking, by realizing that the way I feel, like when I real, the number, we call it a rational self-analysis

an RSA. So, you know, I write down what happened. I write down what I thought about what happened. And that might be 10 different things. And then I write down how I felt. How did I feel? It all starts, for me, the way I do it, and I still do them today, the way I do it is when I feel some way that I don't want to feel, when I realize I'm sad or I'm angry or I'm disappointed, I'm frustrated, I'm stressed out, something's not adding up. Then I just have, sometimes I should do it more than I do, but, but, you know, I write down the feeling first.

and then I draw like a little emoji or emoticon that kind of symbolizes how I feel and then I try to evaluate what led to me feeling that way because through that it's just exercise man if you want your muscles to get bigger you lift weights if you want your brain to get sharper if you want to think better you evaluate your thinking you exercise your thinking and over time the idea is that your thinking patterns get a little better so interesting so you're kind of like back engineering the way you feel into like thoughts and things. It's funny, the ARDAQ program, if you take it seriously,

it turns you into, it turns you into like a psychologist. For real. I love it. Is it R-D-A-T? R-D-A-T. Residensual Drug and Alcohol Abuse Treatment Program. Okay. Something like that. What is this? Florida Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola. Is this the one you were talking about?

Yep. That's the camp. Now, so I'm trying to think of the lady's name. It's a well-known article. She wrote an article about club fed. Club fed. I think she talked about how they had swimming pools in prison, and a lot of people, the taxpayers didn't like that. They painted that, like, that's a very bad thing.

There's this book called Gringo. And it's about this guy that was on the lamb for like 10 years. He actually did time for, he hired Pfizer or one of the big pharmaceutical company to press his pills for him. And they were doing it legally. and he was i think there were speed pills and he was selling like millions of them he was living in Vegas so he talks about the camp that he went to it was co-ed there was women there of course they drew they they they cut that out yeah he said all these these columbian women would show up in their

versachi and you know it's it was like it was it was crazy but i had i i was talking to a female that was on the show and she was talking about her she went to prison for a few years and she was saying that just the women run the prisons because all the the the prison guards are males and they're most times than not they're kind of like dweeby guys you know they're they don't get like the big burly tough guys to run the women's prisons right that makes sense they send them to the men's prisons they send like the dweeby nerdy kind of like frail prison guards to the women's prisons and it was super easy for them to manipulate the guards so like the girls would like tease them like sexually or whatever like and they would go for it and they would totally go for it and they basically ran the

prisons, the prison camps. Even if they did get the big burly guys, I mean, think about it. They still could probably do that, right? The power of, can I say pussy? The power of pussy. You know what I mean? It's crazy. I mean, human nature is human nature. It doesn't matter if you're an inmate or not. Like, it's still there. Frank Venice actually met his wife, his first federal bid. She was a psychologist at the prison. Or a nurse, something like, yeah, I met her there and got married after you. That's another thing. People love to marry. It's a thing where people like to meet and marry people in prison. Specifically like killers and stuff, people who kill people.

So after I completed ARDAP at Pensacola, I did a near home transfer. My sister had my niece, Abigail, and I didn't have a relationship with her. And I wanted to build a relationship with my family. I hadn't seen my father. Now, my mother came to see me, but my father's not big on airplanes. He's not big on traveling, very old-fashioned. So I wanted to get closer to home. The closest prison next to Ashland, Kentucky, was Big Sandy Camp.

Now, Big Sandy is a notorious. USP Big Sandy is one of the most notorious federal prisons in the country. Helicopters landing all the time. People getting killed. Multiple black hands for very large gang organizations there. Black hands? Like the shot call or the guy in charge. Okay. You know, El Chapo.

So, you know, so it's a notorious prison, but they also have a satellite camp. It's just a pen and a camp. So you've got a maximum security prison and then you got a camp, a minimum security prison. Now, this prison, it's notorious in the BOP. Everyone knows about it. It's like heaven. If you have to do time in the feds, you either want to go to Big Sandy Camp

or you want to go to Yankton, North Dakota. Everyone knows that. So, and the reason is there's no fence, so you're not fenced in. There's no locked doors. There's no handcuffs. There's no guards. There's nobody policing you.

You can drive vehicles. If you have community custody, you can drive in the community. They'll give you a credit card and let you go to the store and buy stuff and bring it back to the prison because you're trusted to do that. I serviced 44 vehicles.

I was the clerk at the auto garage. I was also the head chef during lockdowns. So during a lockdown, which was almost all the time because they can't behave at the penitentiary. They're always trying to kill each other. They would bring the campers down there to run the kitchen.

And, you know, it's funny. A lot of those guards there will tell you the only reason we're in prison is to help them run the prison. These guards, they acknowledge, I mean, I've heard multiple people, multiple guards tell me, like, do keep your head up because you're a good dude and you're a hard worker, and that's all that really matters. You know, you're going to, unfortunately, you're going to experience some pushback. It's not going to be as easy for you as it was before, but your heart's in the right place,

and that's really what matters. Honestly, it's just a while. There was 59 inmates at Big Sandy when I got there. That's another reason people want to go there. There's no one there. It's a ghost town. And there wasn't one person at that facility that you couldn't trust living next to you. They're all good people.

They made mistakes. You can call it a mistake. Mistakes like something you did the one. They made the wrong choices for the wrong reasons. Sure. But, and some of them did. Some of them I really believe are innocent. I have some crazy stories where I believe people are innocent.

Donovan Davis is one of them. I don't know how much you know about his story, but... Oh, I know. We did a whole podcast on his story. It's... And that man is... That's a truly good... I mean, if you ever have the opportunity to meet the guy,

yeah. He's a great guy. He's a good-hearted person, a good-spirited person. The whole... It's just insane how something like that can happen to you just by being associated with the wrong people. How long does he have left? Do you know?

I don't know. Or how long he had or no. He got sentenced to 12 years? 12 years. Okay. So, or maybe it was longer than that, actually. That's what he told everybody. But Matt was telling me, I think it was like 16 years.

Oh, fuck. I don't understand it. I don't understand it, like, how the feds can bring evidence into the courtroom and say that, like, you bought this Ferrari and this Lamborghini and this Rolls Royce and this speedboat and this yacht and all of, in this 15,000 square foot mansion. And you bought all of that through illicit gains when it's not true. His family owns a very established horizontal construction company, you know, very large company.

and they lost their own money in the fund. He put a million dollars of his own money. He was one of the victims. He was a victim. Right. And a lot of the victims acknowledged that. They didn't want to see him go to prison. They came to court to testify in regard to that.

But here's the thing. The feds are very good about striking any evidence that helps your case. If it helps you or paints you in a positive light, forget it. The jury's not going to hear it. If it hurt you or makes you look at it. like a scumbag that deserves to rot in prison, they're going to hear it. So it's like they stack the deck against you. And I know that sounds biased, but I've just heard it so much. If you look at how it's done, you know, they have the jury selection, the voir dire, voir dire, however you pronounce it.

And then they have like an evidence, like a preliminary evidence hearing where they get to decide what the judge gets to decide what evidence gets to make it into the courtroom and what evidence does not. So you can't just bring what you have and let the jurors decide. No. you got to let them stack the deck first. And that's what happened. That's what I truly believe happened to Donovan Davis. Yeah, that's unfortunate, man. It is.

He doesn't belong in prison. I can honestly say that. I believe that with every bone in my body. That man should not have done one second in prison. Were there any people in your indictment that went, went to jail or went to prison with you? Like co-defendants or anything? Yep. How many people?

There's five or six. So there's a few people, my employees, the people that work for me. And you know what, that's crazy too, because even though a couple of them helped give them information about me, I can't hold it against them. They're all great people. They've always been good to me. They trusted me. You know, they trusted that I knew what I was doing, that they wouldn't get in trouble. They, too, didn't belong in prison.

They're all great people. You know, I met Natalie in church, of all places. You know, and... Who in church? Natalie Zanetti. So she's one of the... All she was doing was sending money. So I would have fake IDs made.

I would give her the fake IDs. She would go and send money through Western Union and MoneyGram using a fake ID you could use it one time. After you use the fake ID, you got to cut it up. Don't use it again. For whatever reason... This is what you were doing to stash your money? No, this is how we were initially paying

to order the product. I mean, you got to, you got to. Oh, you left that out. I didn't even making fake IDs and doing all that. Oh, yeah. So I would have a whole stack of fake IDs. Like, 100 of them. Same picture.

Different real, real information or as real as possible. That's like what Matt was doing. I don't know the depth of what Matt was doing, but yeah. So, you know, you got to, you got to skirt the system. He was actually, he was scanning IDs, cut and pasting them like the Riddler, scanning them and, like, literally by hand creating these IDs. Wow. No, forgeries.

Yeah. I guess that's where the art degree came in. Yeah, that's the fine arts degree. Crazy. So Natalie, how she got caught, was she used the same ID twice. So there's two different instances. I think she got out of that. I just lost like $15,000 or $20,000.

I gave her like $20,000 cash. And I said, all right, use a couple different IDs and go send money over a couple of day period using Western Union and Moneygram. You can use each ID one time at Western. Union and Moneygram. After that, cut it up, don't use it again because when you try to use it again, it's going to throw a red flag. It's like it runs through their system and they realize that it's not real. And explain to me why you had to use a different ID every time you sent money to China? Because every single financial transaction is logged. The Department of Homeland Security, the DEA, they have access to all of that. So if they see that Justin Smith or Natalie Zanetti

is sending millions of dollars to China. To China. they're going to have some questions, especially when I can't show on paper that I'm making that kind of money. And you're only supposed to use Western Union for what, Friends and Family transfers? So, you know, it's very, very tricky thing. So what happened was she went in the store with, I think,

five grand maybe, and used an ID that she had used before. They kept the ID, alerted the authorities, kept the money. And I guess they, she claimed she got away. She claimed she didn't get detained. She claimed that, you know, that everything was just normal and they let her continue doing whatever she was doing. But the reality is, is she was busted. And she, I'm guessing, she, you know, she flipped. So at that, you know, we don't want you.

All we care about is Justin. We know he's the one putting you up to this. We know that he's the one, you know, he's the one running the operation. He's the one we want. So help us get him. You're okay. Right. So, and then.

You know, and that's how it works. They scare the small fish to get to the big fish. And, you know, it's effective. But at the same time, like, I was the one that made the wrong call. I was the one that sold this to my friends, that sold this to my employees, that convinced these people to trust me. And honestly, that makes me sad, man. Like, like, looking back, that's one of my biggest regrets is the fact that I got really good people in a lot of shit.

Yeah. And they didn't deserve that. But, you know, then you make the argument they're grown adults. They made their own decisions. They knew the risks. Did they? You know, it's a tricky thing. So you lost all your money when you got out.

When you got out, you had basically nothing. When you finally got it. You said you did six years, right? Yeah. The first couple years in prison, CERPIFI was still making money. So CERPIFI was this little niche. We didn't advertise it at all.

It was a little niche SEO product, a crowdsource traffic exchange. We launched it on a site called blackoutworld.com. and we sold like a quarter of a million dollars and it just went it went crazy and then you know after a couple years it died off i wasn't there to run the business but subscriptions were still trickling in um so i was making a lot i was making decent revenue for being incarcerated for the first few years i never had to ask anyone for money never had to ask anyone to put money on my books that wasn't my own money oh okay so and i'm i'm grateful for that you know a lot of guys are

in there i would man i would listen to people on the phone calling their mom saying this guy just stole the shoes off my feet as he's wearing the shoes, lying to their own family, just to get them to send money. And then as soon as they get the money, they go and buy someone commissary so they can get some K2 and get high. And now that's a bad person. You know, and you say, you know, what constitutes a good person, that would not be, that's, how could you do that?

I couldn't live with myself, man. Like, I think, like, I think what if they're addicted to K2, I mean. Yeah, but you're going to blame a drug? Or are you going to accept responsibility and accept it? Well, if you're addicted to K2 doesn't mean you're a bad person, I don't think. No, I think if you're making bad choices and taking advantage of people and hurting people around you and makes you a bad person. But it doesn't mean that you can't recognize your error and fix it and become a good person. You know, the conditions that you're in right now can change.

But the only person that can change it is you. The only person that could change the conditions I was in was me. And I realized that. And I said, well, I better change this shit because this is not okay. You know, this is not, I'm not doing life on installments. I'm not going to prison. This is not my life. Things might be harder now, but I got to make the best of this.

You know, I was 264 pounds when they weighed me in when I got the federal prison. And I lost, I got down to 200 pounds in the first year. Wow. So just working out every day. And I remember I couldn't even run a quarter of a lap. And I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. And now I can go out and run five miles. You know how good that feels?

That feels, it completely saved my life. That's incredible. That sounds crazy, but it's true. Everybody says that. People who did long stents, they say the prison saved their life. It did. It really did. And not just that.

The relationships I made, honestly, I've always been kind of antisocial, wasn't really good at making relationships. Prison forces you to step outside of the box. It forces you out of your comfort zone. You don't have an option. You know, I never used to be able to use public bathrooms. I remember one time in school, I called home sick so I could go use the toilet. you know and I couldn't use a public bathroom but then when you fly into Oklahoma which is usually

the beginning of your bid they fly to Oklahoma which is like the detention center then they decide where you get designated and you go to where you're designated from there pretty crazy right like sentenced in Orlando you end up in a prison an hour away from where you're sentenced but you go to Oklahoma first so weird it's weird but they put you on that rickety rusty 747 that they stole from some con air con air so you know it's crazy all the overheads compartment's like I was like oh no we're going to die you know but but uh you know they put you in a room where there's one toilet in the middle of the room no dividers and there's a hundred people in there so if you have to take a shit you have to use that toilet did you ever do that yeah i mean you don't have

an option county jail was like that too you know when i was in county jail you you have you you can hang sheets and stuff and then the guard yell at you and take to take it down yeah but you're taking a shower in front of everybody you're you're going number two in front of everybody you just you know what we adapt human beings are highly adaptable you think you can't do something but you can do it you know and you have no choice you have no choice you'll do it what how did that how did that taking a shit in a room full of people with no barriers dude it's humiliating it's dehumanizing doing that compared to i mean on the flip side for a kid that never even like to use public restrooms what what was the the actual effect on you from doing that i think it was positive now you know you know

I no longer have that problem. I'm no longer pee shy. I can walk up to a urinal and whip my dick out and take a piss. You know, I can use a bathroom anywhere. Even if it's dirty, I just wipe it off and lay a toilet cover down and just do what I got to do. Dude, if you got to go, you got to go. And, you know, that's so. Did it make you more of like, like, I mean, did it make you more of an open person in general?

Definitely. It would make you more extroverted. How else did it affect you? Yeah, I'm definitely extroverted now. Now I find myself starting conversations with people I don't even know. Yeah. That wasn't me. before prison.

And that's a very, you know, I'm still learning. I'm still getting better at that, but that's a very beneficial thing. Like, getting stuck in your comfort zone is probably the most dangerous thing you could do because you're closing yourself off to all kinds of potential, all kinds of opportunities. I was just at the mall a couple weeks ago, and I was waiting outside the bathroom on my girlfriend, and this guy walks up to me and just starts a conversation with me. And he's like, I like your tattoos. Where did you get him?

I said, federal prison? And this guy's, you know, he's dressed really nice and I can tell he's got money. Turns out he owns a big packing company, has millions of dollars invested in crypto. He's doing extremely well. Now we're talking on telegram and, you know, it's just crazy. If you step outside of your comfort zone and talk to people, that's how you make relationships. And, you know, when I was closed off, I limited myself so much, you know, just so much. I had legitimate business ideas before I went to prison.

If I had not done what was comfortable to me, you know, making money easily, taking the easy road, not considering who it was hurting or, you know, the negative impacts, the negative consequences that could have came from it and just did the right thing, you know, believed in myself enough to engage and talk to investors and sell my idea to the right people, then money is out there. Legal money. Good money. It's out there. It's out there in abundance. And I'm learning that now with Contractor Plus. you know, money is available as long as you're doing right and as long as you can produce reports, as long as you're tracking your progress, you have a good accountability system for yourself and for your team and you can produce reports that show how accountable you're being and the progress that you're making. You know, it's all about the KPIs, but it's readily available. We've already raised $42,000 of a $250,000 seed round. It's been up for less than a month. For what? For what are you talking about? For Contractor Plus.

What's Contractor Plus? So Contractor Plus is a field service management solution for its mobile field service management solution for Android and for iPhone. And we have a web dashboard. It does everything from estimating to invoicing to payments to job scheduling. It literally helps you, whether you're a handyman company or a plumber or an electrician or a painter, it doesn't matter what you do. If you send invoices, if you need to show your, if you want to look good to your clients and you want to win more business and grow. your business as a field service company, Contractor Plus helps you, and it's totally free.

You can go download it for Android and iPhone. It's totally free. What's funny, and I don't know if I can say this, I hope I don't get in trouble for saying this, but I started this business from a cell phone in federal prison. So a contraband cell phone, and of course you're not allowed to have it. But what's funny is, you know, I got off the bus at Big Sandy.

I went there because I heard there's 59 inmates and 57 of them have phones. Some of them have two. So I think it's crazy. First of all, you even got to pick the prison you went to. Normally you wouldn't. So you tell them you want to go to Big Sandy, and then they'll send you to Ashland. I didn't want to go to Ashland.

I was the captain's orderly at Pensacola. So I worked in the hallway, and every morning, I'm not saying I did get preferential treatment, I would say, because of this. I'm not saying normally it would work out this way because it wouldn't. But I went to my case, I did it the right way first. I went to my case manager. After I completed the RDAP program, I said, look, I want to do my I knew your home transfer, which is one of the perks of completing the program successfully.

And she said, well, I'm not sending you to Big Sandy. But you actually get two picks. You get to give them two places that you want to go. And after you complete the program, they're supposed to give you one of the other. Usually, though, it would be something you didn't even ask for. It's crazy. So came back, she wrote down Ashland and wrote down one other. Ashland and Morgantown.

I don't want, she's like, these are the two closest facilities to your house. That's what I'm putting you in for. She didn't give me the opportunity to pick. So I pulled up on the warden in the chow hall, and I said, excuse me, and the captain stood for it, patted me down first before I talked to him. And I talked to him. I told him the situation, what was it in? Miss Pickerel.

And I told him what happened. I was like, look, I'm not trying to throw her under the bus, but, you know, I completed the program. I've done everything right. I've stayed out of trouble. I thought I could put in two things. He's like, you can. And I said, well, according to her,

she's put me in for what she wants to put me in for, and I don't get the pick. He said, I'll have a word with Ms. Pickerel. So then he talks to my case manager, and the next day she calls me to her office, and she's livid. She's yelling at me. I just stood there, like, in shock, like, wow. You know, and she's like, why did you go over my head? Why did you talk to the way?

She's mad that she got caught for not doing her job right. So I went and talked to Ms. Fultz, and interesting, and she was the case manager coordinator. She's like the boss of all the case managers. And, you know, I would hold her door in the morning, hold her coffee for while she was coming in her office. I was always in there polishing the brass and cleaning the mop in the hallways and stuff. So she was already acquainted with me. And I went and talked to her and I said, I told her the situation with, you know, how I told her how everything went down.

And I said, is there any way you could help me to get designated to Big Sandy? She said, why do you want to go to Big Sandy? You want to get a cell phone, don't you? Everybody knows. It's enough for cell phones. And I said, it's a cell phone prison. It's known for. So, so I said, no, I don't want to get a cell phone.

you know that's not my intention i i just i heard it's a good facility she said it is a good facility she said i opened it i was there for 15 years and she said you would probably like it there and i told her how everything went she went down and talked to the warden for a couple minutes came back punched it in the system next thing i knew designated BSY big sandy kentucky wow so made it happen and when i got there as soon as i got off the bus uh officer smith interesting that's my last name. So Officer Smith's, he was walking me through the corridor. I just, I was waiting on a ride. An inmate was picking me up to drive me up to the camp. And so he said, so if you want to get a cell phone, anything you need, just go talk to this guy named Lou. Big Lou, he's the store guy.

You can't miss him. Big black guy with a beard. He's kind of short. He said he's the store guy. So just talk to him. He'll hook you up. And so it's a, so it's a guy. So it's, it's, It's pretty wild, but, you know, you play it off like you're not trying to get a phone. But the staff... What kind of phone was it? So there was all kinds of phones. I mean, people, I saw everything from the latest iPhone to the cheapest Android. I had, it was an Android phone.

It was like a J7. Were they smartphones or were they? Yeah, yeah, smartphones. For sure. I even saw tablets. So I saw everything. But, you know, we would... Fucking Apple store in there.

I hope that I'm not blowing the prison up. by saying this. I'm going to have a lot of people mad at me. But, uh, then don't worry, nobody listens to this podcast. So, you know. Except actually Matt's probation officer listens to it. Does he? I'm sure mine will too. Yeah. Oh, you still deal with the probation officer? I didn't even think about that. I am. So I actually, I've been blessed. My probation officer is,

honestly, I don't think I could have got a better probation officer. He's been good to me. It's not, I've heard horror stories, but he's been nothing but good to me. Really? He's been good to me. me. Of course, you know, he has to show up and drug test me and stuff like that, but you don't have, he doesn't have to worry about me. And it's nice knowing that, like for example, a couple weeks ago, he sent me a link to a program that the United States Patent Office is having where they do pro bono patents. And he was like, this might help you in your business. You know, he's actually

trying to help me. And, you know, that, that says a lot. Do you have to pay any restitution? No, don't. No. Oh, yeah, you're lucky. has to pay a lot of, like, millions. Yeah, when it's fraud and there's, like, injured parties, like when people have lost money, then you have to pay it back. Wachovia, man. He stole all the money from Wachovia. Was it Wachovia?

Yeah. That's before it was Wells Fargo. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's crazy. I remember when that acquisition happened, when they changed all of the Wachovia buildings over to Wells Fargo.

I don't even remember that. I wasn't paying it. How long ago was that? 10 years, at least. Yeah, I wasn't paying attention. It was a while ago. Yeah. That's wild.

I remember Walkovia was like blue buildings, blue and gray. and then everything changed over to the red. I heard Wells Fargo has more offices than any, like more real estate than any other bank. I don't know, but that makes sense. They have more fucking like locations, physical locations.

That's crazy. Which I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing the way the world's changing right now. You're saying like leaving feet. Like nobody works is working in offices anymore. Right. Everything decentralized. Everything's decentralized.

Everything's decentralized. Everyone's working from home doing stuff. I like the, I like the new normal from that. There's a lot that I don't like, but, you know, like flying down here, wearing a mask the whole time. Like, I'm so over the masks, man. Yeah, same area. Like, I think, like, our immune system is meant to be exposed to bacteria and viruses and we're supposed to develop immunity to this stuff naturally.

Just let it work the way, you know, and someone brought it to my attention. The guy I met at the mall. It's so crazy. His username, Freedom Fighter with some numbers on it. But so. His username? On telegram. So, you know, he's a freedom fighter.

What's his telegram and keep talking about? Telegram's an app. They have like groups so you can subscribe to a group and people post stuff in the group. And it's not a lot of clutter. Like you think it's constantly blowing up your phone. It's not bad. It's like a social media app? Kind of.

You know, it's more like sharing information. Like there's good like altcoin and cryptocurrency conversations on there like Bitcoin bin. There's a bunch of stuff on there where you can get good information on the up and coming coins that you should be investing in. You know, new opportunities. So it's kind of like Clubhouse. Clubhouse is great. It's awesome. You know, just, just, Tyler, actually, talked a lot about Clubhouse.

I downloaded it a couple months ago and listened to a few chats that Grant Cardone is big on Clubhouse. You know, really good stuff on there. Startups raising money that talk about how to do it. I mean, the information is readily available. It's like LinkedIn, but with audio. Right. All audio. I think it's a brilliant idea.

It's just people trying to find opportunities. and meet new people. Right. It's actually, it's actually really cool. I like it. Yeah. Pretty cool concept.

I can't get into it. I've tried it a few times. I'll tell you what they did wrong though. By default, the notifications on Clubhouse blows your phone up. Does it? So, oh man, my phone was like,

ding, ding, ding, ding all day. I was like, where do I turn this off at? So how is, how is telegram different from Clubhouse? Telegram is more like just direct messaging. Okay. And then chats. So you can get in groups where,

you know, groups of information is being shared. And there's really good stuff. in there. I mean, as long as you subscribe to the right groups. Right. So, I mean, I think it's useful for sure. Okay. So we're talking about a guy you met in the mall. Yeah. So he... Something about masks or something. Oh, yeah. So he noticed my mask said, freedom doesn't look like this is what my mask says. Oh. And he wasn't wearing a mask in the mall. And, you know, of course, he was looking like a million bucks. So he looked like he owned the mall. And maybe that's why he gets away with it.

but he said, I don't wear a mask anywhere. And I said, well, how, you know, I've tried walking in places without mask and people tell me to put it on or leave. So what do you say when that happens? He just says, it's my constitutional right. I'm not putting it on. You know, but I think about it. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, though, the private property axiom, like the, like if you own a business

and you say that you don't want people in there without masks, don't you have a right to do that? It's your business. Yeah, for sure. So then shouldn't people respect that? You know, people should respect that. If they want to eat at your restaurant. Right. And if not, I think that's the way free market capitalism really regulates itself.

It's like, if you don't want to go to a place that's forcing you to wear a mask, then go somewhere that doesn't. You know, that's your choice. So, you know, I respect private property rights. On the street or driving in your own car or out in the park or whatever. Don't wear it. Right. If there's people around there that aren't wearing masks and you want to wear your mask,

then don't fucking go to the park. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So, you know, but that, that, that, that, you're setting a very clear. message with having freedom doesn't look like this on your mask. Yeah.

It's like the people with the, like you know somebody who has like a Trump mask or like a MAGA mask. You know, they don't really want to be wearing that mask. They're just, they want to, they want to wear that bumper sticker. You know, not to get political or anything, but isn't it kind of crazy? I don't think it's so, things are so polarized right now. Like you drive in like the rural areas and everyone still has their Trump signs up. Oh yeah. Around here too.

Everywhere around here. Like they, this is the first. election, I feel like people have not been able to let go of. They just can't, just let it go, man. Oh, yeah. Let it go. I talk to people all the time. They're always talking about the fraud and the election and voter fraud. They destroyed the ballots. I've heard so much. More people are more pissed off about voter fraud this election, I think, than ever before. It's never been talked about this much as far as in my life time. Every election, like I remember when Trump got elected, it was a bunch of problems. They've been claiming fraud every election for a while now.

Honestly, I feel like it's political theater. It's never been, oh, yeah. It's a distraction. It is. It's like the WWE. But it's never been, it's always been just like, no one's been so attached to the actual person. You know, everyone's been like red or blue.

But he's not a politician. He's a businessman. But they're so attached to him. It's like, fuck the pollock, fuck left or right. It's Trump or die. Trump or bust. You know what I mean? He's such a genius communicator and it's such a genius marketer.

He's really fucking embedded. And he likes to grab women by the pussy. Hell yeah, he does. So why not vote for that guy? Grab him by the pussy. He really, he knows what the fuck he's doing, that's for sure. I have to, I have to hand it to him. But, but yeah, a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of people just can't let go of him.

You know what I mean? They have that emotional connection to him. I think where I'm out with it is like, I realize that it's all a bunch of BS. You know, it's, to me, like, George Carlin, actually, one of my favorite comedians. the late George Carlin. He used to say it's all a bunch of bullshit and it's bad for you. And that's what he had to say about the government. It's totally bad for you.

I just see it as a big lie. They put this puppet in office who's not really making any decisions at all. And that's really what I believe is that, you know, the intelligence community, it's way above that. He's just a puppet. It's just a marionette. And he's someone we can blame all of our problems on for four years or eight years. And then we just move on to the next guy.

and it's funny because they they keep us divided left and right between trivial issues that should not be dividing mankind. Like, it's okay if you have a difference of opinion on something, but we should still be able to shake hands and get along. And like, you know what I mean? Like we should not be so divided over stuff that doesn't matter. You know, it's okay that you have a different opinion than me. The most fault, I mean, the hard part about it is all these fucking companies, all these news companies and social media platforms, everyone who exists on social media who makes a living on social media, the only way for them to generate traffic and earn income is to push these hot button topics

that get people riled the fuck up. Like these police shootings. Pick your side. You're going to be red or blue. Right. Here we go. Put out a fucking headline. And that's how they earn their income.

Those headlines just grab you by the throat. They force you to pay attention to it. That's the problem is that that's how a lot of people make their money online by getting that shit. to go viral. You know what I mean? Getting those crazy headlines, that's what attracts people.

That's what attracts people. That's what gets clicks. Use trigger words. Evoke emotion. Yeah. High arousal emotions. That can be good or bad, but make them evoke curiosity. Make them have to understand what's behind that headline.

Yeah. Or question that. And they're going to click it and they're going to read. And, you know, the headline's the most important part for sure. Right. And that combined with the actual social media platforms that are just giving you the content,

that you typically interact with. Right. You put clickbait on the social media platform. Right. They know what you like. They track all your stuff. They track all your interests. Everything. Dude, it's so crazy. I was talking about my back hurting. And I swear Alexa's listening to me. Like, because an hour later, I'm seeing ads for back pain. I'm seeing ads for like a roller that I like roll back and forth. I was like, I want to buy this. Wait a minute. An hour ago, I was talking about my back hurting. Yep. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Did I consent to this? Oh, yeah. But I did.

That happened to me. I had a friend over. We were talking about, we were talking about, we were talking about, my wife was talking about getting a new cat. This was like a month ago. Before we got our new cat. The next day we're watching a game on TV, a basketball game, and there was a fucking Purina cat food commercial. On TV?

Yeah. So wait, are the television ads syndicated? Yeah, well, I have YouTube TV. Okay, got it. So it's like...

So of course it's all through Google. YouTube gets all like the local networks and it's just like regular TV, but it's called YouTube TV. So my phone's hooked up to it. So my phone's just to everything. I think Google calls it ad sense. So it studies,

it's like a cookie that follows your browser, their behavior. But are they buying the data from Amazon as well? Like, how are they getting, I'm sure. Or the way Google is listening as well. So, you know, your Android's listening. And Google is YouTube. Right. So, you know, when I look in, when I look at my Coinbase account, it has my trade activity. And I look at, like at one point, I would send 100 bitcoins. And thousands and thousands, I go through all the history and it just makes me sick. Because now Bitcoin has hit, what, $63,000? I was buying Bitcoin when it was $20.

And I bought hundreds of them when it was $315. And it stayed there for a while. But instead of saving it, at the time, I couldn't see into the future. I couldn't predict that Bitcoin was going to be worth $60,000. I mean, who could? So I was sending it to pay for the research chemicals that got me into trouble. It's so crazy because if I had just held on to those things, thousands of bitcoins, I would be a billionaire, at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

So it's just, it's unbelievable. What were you saying about this, the array of equipment you had mining them? Oh, yeah. So my friend Brandon and his brother Ben were importing containers full of these 333 megahertz ASIC, ASIC, Bitcoin miners. They're little USB chipsets back in the early days when you could literally mine coins a day from, you know, 10 of these things. And I ordered hundreds of them.

and I set them up on like cooling pads with USB arrays. I'd put like 12 in an array or 10 in an array. And I could install USB cards in the computers where I could have like 20 of them going on any individual machines. So I had like five computers going with a bunch of these mines. I had them on metal racks, like storage racks. And if you open the room, I think I have a picture. If you open the room, you see all these little blue lights blinking.

And you look at the screens and you can see I'm in these mining pools and the Bitcoin's just racking up. But what's crazy is these, by the time they would get a shipment of miners, like it started with these 333 megahertz miners, it would become harder to solve a block, one block, one Bitcoin. So the benefit of pulling all of your resources together

is a hundred different people can be working to solve the block together, and then you get paid faster. If you're working on it by yourself, then you have to wait until you solve the whole block to get the coin. So we'd pull our resources into these groups, and or these pools and so all of our computational power was going to mine the Bitcoin

to, so we could get paid faster. And it's just so crazy because as Bitcoin become more and more difficult, as more Bitcoin got mined, there's only what, 21 million something, Bitcoin's that'll ever be created. Right.

And that's, that's also why the value keeps increasing. As the volume increases, as the 24 hour volume, as more people start, trading and the supply stays fixed, the value will increase. How many Bitcoins was your machine mining a day? Anywhere between 5 and 10. I could mine between 5 in the early days. A month later, that became harder. My same computational power would only mine 3 to 4. A month later,

it would only mine 2 to 3. A month later, it would mine 1 to 2. A month later, and this was in a period of months. I mean, it was very quick. The window was very quick. And you were using these bitcoins that you were mining every day for what? For a lot of things. I was selling them. I was exchanging them. So, right.

So a lot of times I would send it to China to pay for a product that. And you didn't need to create fake IDs to send Bitcoin, right? No, I didn't. That simplified things a lot. Yeah. For sure. But if I just held onto the Bitcoin, you know, it's, man. What did you do with all the Bitcoin before you got arrested?

What I did with all the Bitcoin? You still had a lot of Bitcoin when you got popped, right? No. So I, yeah, I did have some Bitcoin. I had, I didn't have a lot. Most of my Bitcoin I had sent to China. I had a couple alt coins. Like I had some Dodge coin that's gaining a lot of popularity.

You had it back then? Oh yeah. When was that created? 2000, a long time ago, 2011, 2011, 2012. Really? It's been around. So name coin. That's how you get like the dot onions.

I, when the Ethereum came out, ETH, I bought a bunch of that, light coin. I dabbled with cryptocurrency a lot. You know, I'm going to see a friend in Orlando, hopefully while I'm here in Florida, who I put onto cryptocurrency. And just last year he made over a million dollars. This, it's just unbelievable. And here's the thing.

You don't need to know anything about trading. You don't need to know how to read the charts. It helps if you do, but you don't need to. All you need to do is look for the new currencies that are actually backed by decentralized DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations backed by technology that is promising. What is a DAO? So a decentralized autonomous organization, for me to put it in simple terms, I use an example

of an app called Around the Block. It doesn't exist. It's all hypothetical. But I called it around the block because, you know, it's, it has a double meaning. You know, around, it's built on the blockchain. And it's also like an Uber-based app where your driver's waiting to pick you up. He's just around the block. So he's going to take you around the block, whatever.

So picture an Uber-style app. The developers build this technology, and they make it a totally free market. There's no company in the background running things, pulling levers, regulating things, regulating what you're allowed to charge, marking up the prices. Instead, they create a token. They call it Drivecoin, DC. So now, in order to use this app, in order to transact in this economy, you have to purchase Drivecoin first.

when you pay a driver, you're paying them in drive coin. You're not paying them in U.S.D. You're not paying them in your local native currency. You're paying them in the token. It's just like when you go to an arcade. You can't put money in the machines. You've got to first exchange your money for a token. And then you take those tokens and you put them in the machines.

You see, cryptocurrency works the same way with DAOs, a decentralized autonomous organization. It's decentralized. It means it's not centralized on any given server. It's a decentralized peer-to-peer. So that's all you need to create your own alt coin. So, yeah, you can create an alt coin. There's numerous ways to create an alt coin.

But then how do you add value? A lot of these, there's a lot of scams in altcoins. Not saying you can't make money. You can't make money with a shit coin because people do it every day. They pump and dump. That'd be funny. You should make one called a shit coin. Right.

Well, people call shit coins like any, I would say like half of the new tokens, the new alt coins that come out are shit coins. You know, people might have a good idea. But in theory, it sounds good. but in practice they don't know how to really build the tech behind the idea. So all they got is a white paper. They put out a white paper, they build a fancy website, and they sell you on the idea of what it could be.

And a lot of times it's a scam. A lot of times it never happens. They're most of them like light coin and Ethereum. They're all just spinoffs of Bitcoin, BTC, right? Right. I mean, Bitcoin kind of planted the seed. It definitely paved the way and educated people on the blockchain technology. So back to around the block,

to understand what a decentralized autonomous organization really is, is, you know, like, picture the developers build this technology. They're not building a company. They're not forming a C corporation. They're not incorporating at all. It's no government recognized entity, excuse me, at all. Instead, they build this technology, and they allow you as the driver, or you as the rider, you as the person who uses the app,

to choose what you're willing to do and who you're willing to transact with. You as the driver get to set your own rates. You get to choose what you share. You want to share your driver. history, link it with the government API. If it exists, if it doesn't, it should. Link it with your criminal background. Put post pictures of your car, post pictures of yourself, you know, share as much as you want to or don't share anything at all. In a truly free market, people transact with the people they want to do business with based on their credibility and their

believability, not based on, you know, not based on anything else, not based on who the government says you're allowed to do business with or whatever. So let the drivers, if you charge $100 a mile, of course I'm not going to hire you to drive me from point A to point B. I'm going to go with the most economic option. So don't mark up the prices at all. Uber makes money by marking up the fares. They make money by charging a premium on what you're paying the drivers. Right.

And they have hundreds or thousands of employees to pay in the background. For what? It's unnecessary. Build a technology that runs itself. Autonomous. It's fully autonomous. It's automated. So you build a technology.

that does what it needs to do, let people, let everyone who participates in this, choose what they're willing to share, what they're willing to do, force them, the only way to transact inside of this technology is to first purchase a cryptocurrency that's native to your solution, like drive coin is to around the block. And that's how you make money. As more people transact on with a currency, as more people trade a currency that has a fixed volume that has a fixed amount. Like there will only be 20 million of these. More and more people start using it. What happens to the value? Demand increases. The quantity stays the same.

So that drives the price up. So now the developers hold on to say 10%. They hold onto 10%. They hold into 10% of these coins, these tokens for themselves. Because they created the technology. They did the work. They turned it loose to the world. They gave it away. Now, if people see this as a viable option. If they start using this technology, if they start transacting, if they say, well, you know, Uber's more expensive because Uber's charging a premium, so we actually save money by hiring people and around the block. So if they start using ATB or around the block for their ride sharing and they're driving instead of Uber, now people

start buying more drive coin. As people start buying drive coin, the value goes up. The developers get paid. They can sell off their drive coin and convert. it to their local native currency or Bitcoin or whatever, whenever they want. But the problem with this is a lot of the developers can be scammers. So, right. So the problem with shit coins or alt coins in general is it's easy to scam people. You know, you sell people.

You put together a pretty website, which there's thousands of templates available, theme force. You change the logo. You put together a white paper selling the idea of what you're trying to do. And if it sounds good enough, there's enough money in crypto now where people are going, you can sucker a bunch of people and to bind it. How fucking stupid is the term white paper, by the way? Like, what the fuck you couldn't call it?

Try to make it sound better than it really is. Oh, it's a white paper. What the fuck is that even mean? Information on what the product is. What is it a business plan or something? No, I mean, in a gist, it's more like a product plan. It's like what this product, the problem it solves and, you know, and how we're going to do it. Okay.

So if it's believable, people buy it. White paper makes it sound more fancy, I guess. Right. So, and a lot of these coins, that's all they have. If you get in pre-sale, though, like my friend Ian in Orlando, gets in right when these ICOs, these initial coin offerings launch and become publicly available at fractions of a penny. So for five grand, you can buy a million of these things.

So you buy a million coins, and then they shoot up the 20 cents, you know, almost all of them are 100xing within a couple of years. So if you, if you're liquid enough, if you have the access to the capital to actually be able to play, you really can't go wrong because even if you buy, 20 of these, or say you buy 10 of these, and nine of them end up tanking. All right, you put $5,000 into 10 of these tokens. Yeah.

That's $50,000. You got a million of each of these tokens, and one of them hits a dollar. You just made a million dollars on a $50,000 investment. A million dollars. Yeah, that's good. So is that what your friend did? How did he make a million bucks? That's more than it.

He put five grand into. He's, so he's basically just buying new tokens, tokens that he can purchase for a fraction of a penny. Looking for tokens that are so low, but are promising enough. Like, I think his criteria, he actually found a listing on Reddit that shows like the criteria

to kind of avoid bad investments. And he's also taking classes now on how to read the charts. He's getting more into trading, but it's unnecessary. We were just talking about it the other day. It's totally unnecessary. You don't need to know how to trade.

You just need to know how to set up an account, set up an account in an exchange, like Hotbit. I have this wallet called Edge Wallet. Are you familiar with it? I haven't used it, but... Okay. I think there's a slew of different wallet apps you can use, right?

And that's the thing. It's also difficult because certain wallets will only work with certain currencies, will only transact with certain currencies. So, you know, you're pretty much forced to use like pancake swap or, you know, like 10 different, five different exchanges just to be able to get access to all the tokens that you want to trade. You can't do it all in one place, unfortunately. Wow, Bitcoin's down to 52 grand. The whole market as a whole has been down this week.

been down like 30%. I heard it because it was because of some blackouts in China or something. I didn't read about it. But that could make sense. God, you saw China actually announced their own cryptocurrency. I saw that headline like, we're equals now.

Really? So when was this? Recently, a couple weeks ago. A good friend of mine is telling me to buy light coin right now, a crypto expert that I know. You say he keeps nagging to me. Did you buy light coin yet? Did you buy light coin yet?

Interesting. I mean, the entry point is still low. enough where it's a good long-term store of value, but I think it's directly tethered to the valuation of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin increases, light coin increases, and vice versa. Yeah. What about OXT? Have you heard of OXT? I haven't. How much do you trade Bitcoin? So I'm not actively trading, but I do buy. So you buy it and sit on it. You don't buy it and sell it. So my rule of thumb is every time the currency doubles, I sell off 10%. So if I buy in at a fraction of a penny, and

And it doubles in value. You know, I'll sell off 10% of my holdings. And every time it doubles, I'll sell off 10%. And that way, I'm not, I don't ever regret selling too much. So I don't get too far ahead of myself. But 10%? Why 10%? That's just my method.

And sometimes it's not always 10%. But I don't want to sell off more than a certain amount because as the value continues to increase, I want to catch that ride. I don't want it to sell everything. Like, look at what happened with Ripple. You know, XRP. XRP. So they, it went up to like $3 and something a few years ago.

It's an alt coin. Okay. So, and it went up to like $3 and something a couple years ago. And then it dropped all, it plummeted, went all the way back down. Pump and dump, went all the shot skyrocketed. When all, now it's like $1.70. So it's climbing again. And, you know, I think the new, the new floor is going to be much higher.

It's going to, I think these tokens as more and more people become aware. you know, the Coinbase IPO is going to impact the crypto market at large as well. As more people become aware and it becomes easier and more accessible to trade cryptocurrencies, and as the currencies gain viability, as more and more businesses start accepting cryptocurrency, as more people see it as a viable option, the value is going to continue to increase. Yeah. Without a doubt. So a lot of people have Bitcoin projected it over, being valued over a million dollars of coin,

Yeah, I heard people talk about that. In five years? Yeah, something like that. I mean, everyone has different. They run back tests and they produce different financial models of what they think will happen. None of it's 100%. But one thing is for certain, it's going to continue to increase in value. So, I mean, and to further validate that, you've got all of these huge hedge funds

and these big institutional funds that are now dumping billions of dollars into the crypto market. So they believe in it. They see, they understand how the value. What do you think about Tesla, or not Tesla, Elon Musk dumping all that money into Bitcoin? I mean, what about it? What do you think about doing the opinion? Some people say that he's just doing it just to manipulate the price of Bitcoin so we can just like sell, make it go up and then sell it off. I mean, I don't know the depths of his trading strategy or what he's doing, but of course it's an economic decision.

like he's thinking about how he can make more money and he sees it as a viable option. He's an extremely smart guy. Yeah. You know, so that just further adds validity to why you should be buying crypto. Like if you're making $1,000 a week right now,

I don't know, whatever you're making, your paycheck, set aside 10% don't invest it into like an IRA and stuff. Buy cryptocurrency. Buy cryptocurrency. Don't freak out and sell when it, immediately when it doubles in value or goes up 20% or whatever.

Don't sell it all. hold it for a few years, you're not going to be sorry. And, you know, I'm not a financial advisor, and I can't tell you, like, legally I can't be like, go put all of your money into crypto, but I can tell you what I've seen over the last, you know, 10 years. Do you invest at all in, in the actual stock market? Very little. So I have a few stocks, but I don't. Do you have an IRA? I do not. No. Nope. So traditional investment. What's your balance with a traditional stock market in crypto. Like what is your, what's the, like, my traditional stock market, I have a couple thousand dollars in a Weeble account, a few thousand dollars in Robin Hood. Everything else is cryptocurrency.

I'm 100% in the crypto. I did 4x. Me and Ian actually had a joint fund in the 4x market. And dude, like we had days where we would make like $5,000, $10,000. Then we had days where we almost lost everything. We'd hit margin calls, like learning how to trade and trust. What is 4x for people who don't know? So the foreign currency exchange. It's just, Like when you fly into a foreign country, right when you get off, you can't use American dollars there. Well, in some countries you can, but typically you've got to first exchange your American dollars for their local native currency. So you would exchange it for, if you go to Europe, you're going to exchange it for the euro. You know, if you go to Australia, you're going to exchange it for the Australian dollar.

They have a little window that says currency exchange. You go, and they have the exchange rates. So that's what the Forex market is. So you can download an app called like MetaTrader. You can set up an account with a broker who's just swapping currency for currency, and you can trade currencies. So when one, you're basically betting. You're saying that you believe the United States dollar is going to be stronger or weaker against currency X. And that's what the 4x market is.

That's what the 4X market is. You're exchanging one currency for another. Wow. Crypto works the same way, except you're exchanging one alt coin for another or one token for another. All value is subjective to a certain. certain point, but then you have like fixed values that we decide are, are the actual value of certain things. So these tokens. So we accept whatever the, whatever the, whatever the, exchange rates are, we accept that as the truth. Now, we have holdings in different, different,

uh, tokens. We decide, you know, this one's up 10 percent. This one's down 10 percent. We decide what we want to exchange for, for what. And at any given time, we can send the money to a, to an exchange like Coinbase. And we can do a withdrawal. in our local native currency. So if we want to get it back to cash, not hard to do. Right. $10,000 a day like that. So pretty impressive.

I feel so, I feel dumb and I feel just unconfident about it. Just because I got in, I didn't get into it until I was, until it was like $45,000. Bitcoin. I mean, a good thing is it's a fractional currency, so you can just buy. And I put a bunch of money in and then it went up to 62 or whatever. Now it's down to 52. Right. I mean, you made money, right?

Kind of. I'm kind of like even. I feel like I'm just at even right now. I'm not a financial advisor. My strategy would be to mimic what he ends done. You know, look for new currencies that are viable. Look for teams that are believable. Look for teams that, you know, and I hate to say this because, you know,

I don't have a degree from Harvard or Yale. And you don't have to have an Ivy League college education to do something big, to do something important and to actually create value. You don't. You don't even have to have a college degree, as a matter of fact. So, but look for teams that are believable. Look for teams that have already created tech that have done something successful. Because now you, now it's like, what's the name of the coin?

I don't know the coin offhand, but I sent it to Ian a couple months ago. The co-founder of Apple, Wozniak, created a token, put his name on it. Yeah, it did. I didn't even know that. A couple months ago. And I told him, I was like, buy this. He didn't buy it, actually. And he came back to me, and he said, I wish I would listen to you.

He said, it went up. I said, it's all about the person behind it. The person's believable. You know, the person. Same thing as stocks. It's all motions. Right. And that goes back to Elon Musk.

You know, is he, does he see value in what he's, of course, he knows he's going to make money. so mimic what he's doing you're going to make money too if you can find access to like what his portfolio breakdown is apply that to yours you're going to make money fuck so for sure well that was a way better ending than the first one i'm glad we did that for sure cool bro oh by the way how many uh how how how many bitcoins did you own at the at your peak oh man i mean at any figure out how how how how how what your net worth would be right now so at any given time The problem is I would have like a hundred here, a hundred there, a dozen here, a dozen there, a hundred here. But at any given time, I never had thousands.

Just humor me for one point. But in total, probably 5,000 Bitcoin. You had 5,000 Bitcoin. At any given time. Yeah, I mean, in total, if you total it all up, for sure. So what's the math? 5,000 times 55,000. I don't even want to hear this number.

Don't want to hear it. 275 million. There you go. Jesus Christ, dude. Quarter of a billion. That's bonkers. You know, and I know so many people that came from nothing,

and now they're swimming in cash, making good investments. I know plenty of people that are literally crypto millionaires. I'm going to see one in Orlando. But what does he do? So after he got the million dollars, right? After his initial investment turned into a million in, this certain alt coin, right?

Right, it doesn't stop. You just keep it in there or do you pull any out? Keeps exchanging one currency for another. So don't sell off everything. Take back your initial investment. Get your initial investment back and exchange it back for your local native currency or whatever you choose to be your long-term store of value.

Whether that's Bitcoin or USD or whatever, put it in something that's accessible, that's safe to you. Leave the rest of it. in the market. And now, now when you see that a current, you buy the dips. So when you see that a currency's down 30%, read the news about it, make sure you're not making a bad purchase, but more often than that it's going to rebound, buy the dip. Don't buy the peak. Don't buy when Bitcoin's, you know, $63,000 and it's at the top of a peak and you haven't seen it

drop in forever. Wait, be patient. It's going to go back down, buy it, wait for it to increase. And then you can keep, so if you have, if you have, say, a dozen different cryptocurrencies, you can just monitor your portfolio. They have crypto bubbles. So you can look at the performance on crypto bubbles and you can see what's down and what's up and you can make your decisions. You can say, okay, this is a good time to exchange this currency for this currency. Exchange a currency that's up for a currency that's down and keep swapping. You're not going to lose. And that would be more like a day trading approach. Like you're constantly trying to make trades to make money. And it works as well. Or you can just, your strategy can literally be, I don't want to learn how to

read the charts. I don't want to learn how to study and to make calculated decisions. I just want to buy new currencies and I want to wait and I want to make money. And that's working for a lot of people. It's working for a lot of people. You don't have to be a smart trader or you just don't. So it's wild, man. Interesting times. Yeah, for real. You know, a lot of people, that guy was talking to you from the mall. He said the last time we were all wearing masks was 1917, 1918, when they implemented the Federal Reserve System. So a lot of people were against that.

That was a big financial shift. And they had to distract people and keep people gagged. So a lot of people, like in the anarchist, voluntarist, a lot of freedom fighter mentality people truly believe that what's going on right now, there is what we're being told and what we're being spoon-fed coronavirus. Not saying it's not a real virus. Definitely is. But did it come from a bat or did it come from a laboratory?

And there's some shenanigans there as well. And then if you look at like Bill Gates and how he was running models on like pandemic models for the last three years. And the most recent one was like six weeks before we found out about coronavirus here in this country. And how he's an authority figure on the topic. There's a lot of controversy over the laboratory thing. Wu-hee pharmaceuticals, Wuhan, China, where it came out of. You see the same billionaires are on the board at this pharmaceutical company. This laboratory actually messes with like bio, like stuff of this nature.

The reason people like to discredit, people are saying that the lab thing is a conspiracy theory. People are shitting all over that idea because Trump's the one who originally said it. He also said you could drink bleach or inject bleach. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's weird, though, because it's actually, but that is actually, like, a legitimate thing. I think, I don't remember who it was, but it was somebody high up at the CDC originally said that the lab thing was totally viable, and they're actually investigating it. And because Trump said it, everyone in the media is trying to make it seem like it's not real.

And they're trying to, like, discredit the lab thing. But the lab thing's actually, it seems like it's, man, I think a lot of smart people that I listened to. You are saying that the lab thing is very legit. I personally believe that nothing's a coincidence. Yeah. This isn't coincidental. It was created by design. Like, I want to be careful.

Like, what? I don't know about, I don't know where to go, though, with the conspiracy theorists that I talk. I love conspiracy theories. They're fun, but I don't know where to go. I believe we're gearing up towards a global financial reset. So, you know, like wiping the debt. I mean, think about everything else that's happened over the last year. You know, they're putting money, economic stimulus,

I could just put it in as further in debt like the debt doesn't matter. And depositing money in people's bank accounts. Meanwhile, we're walking around with our faces covered. And I don't know, but this shit's not normal. It's not okay. They say it's a new normal, but there's something very wrong with what's going on right now. And I think that it's more than what people are being told. I can feel that.

You know, I definitely do. I think probably a global financial reset and a digital currency. If you look at last year, ID 2020 in the country of Bangladesh. So they ran a new, it was like a pilot program where they were digitizing identification, vaccination records, your digital identification. I don't know the extent of it all yet, but the idea is to get all of the information related to you in a digital form. And I believe the state of Washington, Bill Gates' home state, is that a coincidence? So did a similar program.

So I think ultimately the goal is going to be get our identification digitized, get our currency digitized. And money's dirty, right? It's been everywhere. Like there's like trace elements of cocaine on every $20 bill. Yeah. So it's filthy. It's full of germs bacteria. You'll get COVID touching that dollar.

So don't touch it. Just use your credit card. Right, right. So make it a dollar on the screen. But here's the benefit to the central bank, the bankers, is they control. your spending power. If they want to turn you off, all they have to do is flip a switch or press a button. Right.

Now you can't buy anything. You're valueless because your value is just a number on a screen. So, you know, there's a huge incentive for the powers that be, not Trump, not Biden. Who are the powers that be? Well, so, I mean, this is conspiracy theory, but what did they say? The mayor of engine bloodline. There's like 13 bloodlines and you can Google it that supposedly own the majority of the world.

You know, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, stuff like that. Also people believe that they're aliens or their reptiles. So David Ike kind of says that they're all lizards. You know, they're like hybrids or they're like reptiles. I just had a guy on here the other day who was talking about how they're the ones who run the country and they're all aliens from another dimension. They do believe that.

I don't know. My conspiracy mind is limited. way before we get to the lizard talk. But, you know, I read, I did read the Perception Deception in Prison by David Ike. And he has some really crazy, interesting, far out beliefs. What is it? What is the title? The perception deception. Deception. It's like, dude, it's thicker than the Bible. It's crazy. But it was an interesting read just to see, like, how far out. Like this dude, David Ike, I don't know if you ever heard of him. I know who he is. So he went to Peru and had the spiritual awakening. And,

He was, like, connected with the infinite. I'm guessing he went and did some, like, Iowa Oscar or something, just excluded that part. But he said he was, like, standing in the middle of a field and just, like, had this spiritual awakening. So now every year he visits that place, he goes to that same field and, like,

tries to reconnect with, I don't know. But so, like, the conspiracy community would call it the Anunnaki. They would say that, like, and the spiritual community or the religious community would call it the Nephilim. The fallen angels. So, you know, they do have archaeological proof of, like, elongated skeletons. They've actually found these elongated skulls.

And, you know, there's different theories on how those came about. But in giants, you know, seven, eight, nine feet tall. So Christians would believe that it's like the fallen angels came here to breed with our women and, like, reproduce. The other theory is that the Anunnaki, a reptilian race came to earth to extract the surface gold and bred with the Neanderthals and created Homo sapiens. So people have some pretty far out, you know, how would I know? I have no idea, but. Well, there was just the news that came out on NPR just the other day about that they released evidence or it was something.

I didn't read the whole article. I read like the top headline of it, but they basically, they released. information about manipulating chimpanzee DNA or mixing monkey and human DNA together. Really? They were like fucking with embryos or whatever.

Wow. And it's like very, very close to the whole stoned, or the, not the stone date theory, the theory that aliens came down and injected their DNA into primates, lower primates to create us.

Right. To advance evolution. I don't know what to believe. But what I do know, there's a documentary called All Wars or Bankers Wars. And that's a, really eye-opening. Like, when you follow the money and you realize that, like,

there's a certain class of people that get to create the money that we're spending, they create it. Okay, out of thin air. They create it. We attribute the value to it. We say, yep, we accept this as our medium of exchange, as our method of exchange. We now give it this value. This

dollar is now worth a dollar because we say it is. We believe it is. All value is subjective, though. But this certain class of people gets to create that. And then they get to lend it out at interest. They get to create something that didn't exist.

They get to lend it to everyone in the world and charge interest on it. And they get these people in debt. When you're in debt to someone, what are you? You're a slave. You're a debt slave. You're a slave. You're enslaved. They own us.

They own. So, you know, in that much economically, I can't really dispute that fact. So all wars are bankers. What that aims to illustrate in like 45 minutes is that the bankers fund both sides of every conflict. They profit regardless of who wins. It isn't about who wins.

And if you look at like how wars have, how we're waging wars now, like we didn't wage a war on a specific enemy. We waged a war on terror. We waged a war on drugs. Drugs is the enemy. Terrorism is the enemy. but isn't war itself terrorism? You're dropping bombs on people. Yeah.

That's terrorism, dude. Like that's terrorism. So we're waging a war on war? I don't know. I don't know, man. It doesn't make any sense. But when you think about it, it sure, it does. It stimulates the economy.

Yeah. Thousands of jobs, billions of dollars. Yeah. It's all about the money. It's definitely all financially driven. Everything. Everything. So, you know, I say those are the people creating this construct

that we live within and that we accept as normal. And those are the people that see Bitcoin as a threat or solid as a threat and realize that, you know, this is threatening everything that we've created. It's threatening our power structure. It's decentralized autonomous organizations threaten everything. If people realize that they can create tech and not build a business behind it and better the world, like turn it loose where we can't regulate it, and they can actually derive value, extract value out of that without paying taxes,

without legitimizing it through registering a corporation or, you know, hiring and paying all these fees and penalties and, you know, everything that comes to starting a business, the barrier to entry to start a business is not easy. If you don't know someone with money or you don't really understand how to do the work to, like for me, it's working two jobs. It's burning the candle at three ends just to make ends meet and make sure my developers are paid. And I'm willing to make that sacrifice because I understand that's what it's going to take.

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. If I don't do that, I won't make it. And some people have that drive. Some people are willing to go the extra mile and make that happen for themselves. And kudos to them. That's great. But the thing is, is it shouldn't be that hard. If you really have the passion and drive and the right intention,

and the idea, like in an idea of meritocracy, if the idea is good and the execution is good, you should be successful. And I think that, you know, government just further complicates things. You know, taxes and regulations and licensing. And it just, I don't know, man. It's not a free market.

We don't have a free market. This is not capitalism. It's a hybrid. We have a socialism. You can call it whatever you want, but we got all these. socialistic safety nets. You've got, you've got, I know I'm stepping on some toes here, but like welfare and section 8 and you know, this is, you're literally redistributing wealth. You're

taking wealth from one category of people and you're saying, well, we can't, we are our brother's keeper. We can't let our brother fall short. We can't let our brother starve. So we, you know, we have to make sure they're housed and clothed and fed. Why? I know that sounds horrible. I'm not saying me as a person, if I have the ability to help, I want to help. But should I be forced to at gunpoint? Because that's the reality. We've disassociated that reality, but that's the reality. If I choose not to pay taxes, what will happen to me?

Armed of the teeth, IRS agents will kick in my door just like the DEA did. They will shove guns in my face and they will throw me in a cage. We use violence to extort our own people and that is not okay. That is barbaric. It is not okay. That is everything that is wrong with the world. Yeah, but if the country is a community, you know, if you live in a community and you want your community to thrive, you have to protect everybody involved.

And if you, and the idea makes sense that if, if we are a country, if we are a community together, we have to help everybody. We don't want to have a country full of losers. Well, I agree with that. So I agree that we, like, if I have the ability to help you and you're, and you're trying to do something meaningful, I should help you, but I can't agree with the absolute everybody because I also believe that not everybody deserves to be helped. Some people don't even want to help themselves. And if they're making poor choices and they're not willing to do the work, they're not willing to actually put their best foot forward and pull their,

at least their own weight. Just contribute enough. You can only take from the table what you're willing to bring to it. If you're not willing to bring anything and you're just on the take, take, take, you are not deserving. That is my belief. And I know some people would say, well, even if that person wants to just take

and doesn't want to contribute, we should still make sure he's paid. I can't go that. I don't believe that. Because you're taking from me. You're stealing from me. And I'm working 16 hours a day just so that I can get to where I want to be in life.

Why should I support you too? Yeah. I think we should at least be able to, if we're going to have to be forced to pay taxes, we should at least be able to choose where our tax money goes to. beautiful idea. You know, at least that would be a start. That would be ahead in the right direction. beautiful idea and things like voting as well. I personally, education is probably one of the most important things.

I think even if a poor kid can't afford it, if he wants to be educated and he wants to show up and wants to do something and he has goals, then I believe that tax should be able to pay for that. Because like I said, we don't want a country full of fucking losers. We want a country full of smart people who are going to innovate, who are going to generate money, who are going to generate jobs, who are going to provide opportunities for more people. We don't want fucking losers. I agree. So educate everybody. I would much rather, my. looted tax dollars go to fund education and health care, then dropping bombs on innocent people.

Totally. Totally. So I agree with you there. 100%, man. For sure. Well, cool, man. We're not going to solve all the world's problems, but we can at least figure out our own. That's right. But thanks again what's the name of your app again? Contractor Plus. Contractor Plus. Contractor with a plus sign, or you can just type it out, ContractorPlus.com.com.com. And it's on both the app stores. It's totally free. So if you're a contractor, you know somebody that's a contractor, download it, man. It's free. Check it out. Cool, man.

I love it. Thanks again for your time, dude. I appreciate it. Thank you.