35 Burst results for "First Farmers"
Recipes for Success
What Inspired Ciara Lynch to Transition From Marketer to Dairy Farmer?
"So learning a little bit about your background Ciara I know that about four years ago now you've made that career transition away from being like I said in marketing in corporate this big kind of glamorous high -flying life you were in client services and you know even traveling globally for work and then you transitioned into being a full -time dairy farmer and I suppose I just love like it's not a pivot I suppose that a lot of people maybe make so I just love to understand what were some of the influences that led you to make that change. I suppose there's there's I suppose multiple influences the first the most important one is my husband is a dairy farmer I suppose I would see him in the mornings kicking up his heels and kind of jumping across the hedge to go to work while I sat on the m50 for the back part of you know an hour an hour and a half each way I was like there has to be an easier way to do this life and I suppose I just kind of got quite frustrated you know you're you spend eight nine ten sometimes twelve hours a day outside of the house that you're working to pay for I think this is just this is madness so there's a bit of that going on there you know see something else and then I suppose the level of the career that I was at I wasn't sure if I could find something like that closer to home but up and down the m50 it seems fine when you're it's all easy when you're in your 20s but kind of the older you get there's more slides than this but yeah I suppose my husband I just loved his whole attitude to life he loved work he always felt kind of never felt like work and then the other side of the thing is I just started to burn out I was exhausted even listening back to your your very act of my career I am I loved it I absolutely loved it until I just didn't love it anymore I was just knackered all the time I worked for an amazing and amazing company they were a husband and wife team I learned so so much from them and it was it was probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make was supposed to leave that job because you know we were really good friends as well as you know really good colleagues and I just said I can't take this anymore I was I said there was actually at one point I had stayed with my parents one night and my dad was traveling to Galway that next morning and we both left you know her house at the same time and my home house and my dad got to go away before I got to you know exit 13 and 15 like this this is insane like this is insane absolutely so yeah so I suppose between the kind of the exhaustion and then you know is there another way that we could do this and I just said okay let's let's go for it let's jump into it you know what would that look like what was how would we go about it and I suppose the influence on that then as those kind of another units came up you know there wasn't a gun to be able you know you can't just kick your fingers and go I'd like a job in your dairy farm please so a second unit a second dairy farm came up for us that we could leave and we sat down and we talked about it and we looked at us and actually a really interesting thing to do is if you look at what it actually costs you to get to work so we well he ran the numbers on it he's the numbers guy and it would be realized it was costing 10 grand a year just to get to the office so that was including you know diesel and diesel was a lot cheaper back then so that was like diesel like depreciation tax like my tolls used to be kind of 150 200 so like it's really really interesting actually just when you sit down you look at it going okay well hang on if you think you know a wage cut somewhere you know where do you really really be saving yeah it's a really really interesting exercise to do for anybody who's trying to you know write out that pros and cons list about will I make the change so for that that was a huge one for me like that is absolutely it's like that's you know you're cutting time off your salary the agency they're looking at how it actually you're you're getting to work
Recipes for Success
Treat Others the Way THEY Want to Be Treated With Ciara Lynch
"You know the way like people often say like treat people how you want to be treated that's not actually true like you should actually treat people how they want to be treated because it's exactly to your point for some people like public recognition is horrifying yes there were times you would think not giving someone more hours is a good thing but you're right if someone is trying to save then it isn't so I think that's amazing that you're bringing that in to the farm as a workplace I suppose our biggest thing is you get that you're trying to be like an employer of choice yes yeah you know we just want to suppose create a place where people are happy coming to work and like there's a couple of the you know and I'll know if they're having a good day or a bad day because they'll they'll like if they're happy I just they'll be whistling they'll be singing they'll be you know do their work or do their jobs whereas I know okay if he's quiet and you know you'll kind of get down to the crux of the issue there really quickly but yeah it's it's just it's trying to create a really nice workplace as nice as possible and look we don't always get it right you know there's always going to be a couple of people who don't agree with how you do things and that's just life that's nature you know that's just human human elements on it because when you're in our business there's there's times where it's really you know it's high pressure like calving season I'm sure you remember from you know from growing up my calving season is full on like it is I always say if I'm to compare it to like my marketing spiel it's like it's pitch week yes for 12 weeks straight and then you have you know a nice maybe two or three week break and then you're into breeding season which is like double pitch week that's like coming down to the crunch that is you know we're just going to find on the new flight but we need to make sure that all of these things are done yeah and you're exhausted you're emotionally drained you are you're you're spent and then you go back into like another another heavy 12 weeks so we always kind of say like from february to the very june don't knock on the door um called in our house because we're just like zombies and but you have to be and that's where you really have to be aware of how people are behaving and just kind of monitoring people's behavior are you doing okay do you know do you need extra time off you know what's going on are you feeling all right because it's a busy time it can be really stressful this spring in particular was really tough on all farmers the weather just was it rained from March pretty much straight through to May you know and that puts physical pressure on because I mean cows supposed to be out normally we'd be lucky enough we'd have cows out kind of by the end of february we still have cows in shed in May and that takes us to the body and the mind right is it ever and you know you know at some point it will stop
Evangelism on SermonAudio
A highlight from Glass Half Empty & Half Full - The Perspicuity of Scripture
"Do you struggle with understanding the scriptures? Do you frequently hit roadblocks in your Bible reading? Do you struggle from even having a basic sense of satisfaction in your scripture reading? in your scripture reading? Sana, sana, colita, derana. If you're a Spanish speaker here today, you would know what I just said. Sana, sana, colita, derana. Lalo, could you translate those words as literal as possible for me in English? Yeah, as literal as possible in English. Or he'll heal frog bottom, is that another one? Yeah, he'll heal frog bottom. Now, if you weren't a Spanish speaker, you wouldn't know that what I just said is objectively clear in context. He'll heal frog bottom, literally translated in English, means nothing to a person who doesn't know Spanish. Even if they could translate Spanish to English. So, in reality, this is a phrase that we would often, or Spanish speakers would often tell children when they've, say, fallen on the floor and gotten injured, right? It's almost like as if it's a call to courage, like, you'll be okay. Another example in the English language is a stitch in time saves nine. I don't know if you guys have ever heard that. Have you guys ever heard that, a stitch in time saves nine? Okay, so no one before the 1980s, or sorry, no one after the 1980s. A stitch in time saves nine is an expression that basically means if I don't fix this stitch right now, the nine ones later are gonna fall apart, right? So, it's really a call to prudence and saying, well, I need to do this right now so that things don't get worse down the line. What I said in Spanish earlier, once again, is utterly and objectively clear. Utterly and objectively clear. It's a phrase with a particular meaning, and yet, as I said before, only a native Spanish speaker would understand. To everyone else, what I said was absolutely obscure. we're So, several weeks now into our doctrine of the Scriptures in our confession, and having recently just covered the sufficiency of Scripture, we now arrive at the question of perspicuity, perspicuity, perspicuity. We can say everything we want about the sufficiency of the Scriptures, the sufficiency of Scripture for faith and godliness, but if Scriptures don't have what we will go into later as perspicuity or a degree of transparency or clarity, we couldn't access its sacred truth. Or we would at least need to depend upon someone else to access its sacred truth, and that'll come a bit later. If you do have a copy of the Confession of Faith, feel free to turn there, and that will be in chapter one, paragraph seven. Chapter one, paragraph seven. But if you don't, just feel free to follow along as I read. All things in the Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all. Yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or another that not only the learned, but the unlearned in a due use of ordinary means may attain to a sufficient understanding of them. Now this doctrine here in our Confession deals with how clear the Scriptures are to the people of God. And that whole doctrine is called perspicuity. If you are paying close attention to this paragraph, and as I mentioned, this whole doctrine, not just part of it, but the whole, has to do with perspicuity, then you would realize that perspicuity or transparency or clarity takes into account two things. One, clarity, and two, obscurity. One, clarity, and two, obscurity. So if you've never heard of the word obscure or obscurity, it just means less clear or not as clear. So just as if you have a glass that's half filled with water, half it's simultaneously filled and half empty. So that old adage, are you a glass half full or half empty person? You can just go down the drain, right? A glass halfway filled is both half filled and half empty. Likewise, with the Scriptures and the clarity of the Scriptures, insofar as parts of it are extremely clear and parts of it are not as clear, the perspicuity of the Scriptures actually encompasses two things. Both clarity and obscurity. Very clear and also some parts not as clear. I have a few observations from our tradition, from Peter van Maastricht, I can never pronounce his name correctly, van Maastricht, Francis Turretin, and William Whittaker. But before I get there, just know that this doctrine of perspicuity is a major battle in the Reformation. 16th century Rome so emphasized the obscurity or lack of ease of understanding of the Scriptures that they argue that if you don't have the pope and the magisterium, you can't interpret the Scriptures because if you did, you're not skilled enough to do so and you would most likely fall into various forms of heresy. Now, understand that there is a sense in which that is not false. It is very easy for people who just pick up the Bible on their own and refuse any kind of accountability to a church or Christian doctrine or any kind of wisdom from the past to easily err on the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ. It's so easy to do that. And I'm sure many of you may not have been previously accountable to a confession of faith before or a creed, and how often may you have discovered later on, oh, I said this in a certain way about God that was very wrong. It's very easy to do that. Okay, so let's come back to van Maastricht, Turretin, and Whittaker. Whittaker says this, perspicuity or obscurity, notice Whittaker didn't just assume that perspicuity is the same as clarity. He also thought of it in terms of hard to understand, obscurity. Perspicuity or obscurity is either internal or external. By internal, Whittaker means the heart of the interpreter. By external, he means the objective clarity of the scriptures. So if we go back to sana sana colita derana, right, sana sana colita derana is objectively clear. It's an objectively clear expression which calls someone to courage after having encountered a mini tragedy. But it may not be clear to everyone interpreting that because they may not know Spanish, or even if they knew how to translate words of Spanish to English, they still may not know how that particular idiom or expression or saying translates in English. More would have to be taught to them in order for them to understand that. So, in the same sense, the scriptures, the clarity of the scriptures are objectively and externally clear. But at the same time, it requires work and effort on the part of the one interpreting the scriptures to be able to assent or come to that clarity. What's very interesting is that this chapter in our confession doesn't even talk about the obscurity of the scriptures to non -believers. A small aside, it's very easy for us to communicate the gospel one time to a non -believer, send them off with a Bible and expect them to just read things on their own. In reality, we really should be thinking about evangelism more so in the context of the local church, bringing them to church to hear the ministry of the word of God in the presence of Christ. Why? Turton quotes 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 3. 2 Corinthians chapter 4 verse 3. He says this. But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing whose minds the God of this age has blinded, who do not believe lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God should shine on them. The scriptures were not meant to be clear to those who are perishing or even those necessarily yet who will be saved one day. It is nothing short of the ministry of the Holy Spirit that is a requirement for someone to receive the message of the gospel, commit it to their souls, and assent or believe outwardly the doctrines of the Lord Jesus Christ. He goes as far as to say that ordinarily the ministry of the church, sermons, and commentaries are necessary. And despite all of this, he still wants the Christian to have the comfort of reading the scriptures. The Reformers understood just like with Roman Catholicism does. That there are difficulties in the scriptures, yet they came to a different conclusion. The conclusion that they came to was though there are difficulties and though a Christian should be interpreting the scriptures in the context of the local church, not to be expectant that the minister teaches them how to interpret the Bible in the sermon and they're supposed to do everything on their own afterwards. This is a conjoined effort. The doctrine or the expectations of interpreting the scriptures to our souls is very much a joint effort. You have the responsibility of hearing the word of Christ from the minister of the gospel to interpret and apply it to your conscience. He has the responsibility of aiding you and lifting you on Jacob's ladder. Our confession points to various scripture passages on this point. I'll just read to you two examples. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple and also the entrance of your words gives light. It gives understanding to the simple. Meaning, the scriptures have in themselves a light to be given to the Christian. We are expected to come to the scriptures as if they are a light to us, a lamp unto our feet, a light unto our path. I've stated this before and I will state it once again. It is entirely possible for something to be written with sufficient clarity and yet, because the reader may lack the ability, he may not be able to fully understand it. And likewise, when speaking of the clarity of the scriptures, not everything is as equally clear. Not everything is as equally clear. I hope you're seeing where this lesson is going. Partly, it's a call to encouragement to receive the basic truths of the Christian faith from the scriptures with a willing and submissive attitude. But on the other part, it's a call to humility and to have very reasonable expectations of what you can accomplish apart from your local church. That is where things get very interesting for us. Roman Catholics have often, at least in the past, accused the Protestants on their doctrine of perspicuity, trying to portray the Protestants as those who believe that every part of the scriptures is so easy to understand that even a farmer can read every single part and understand it as in the same way that a trained and spiritual theologian can. This is not the view of the Reformers. It is not the view of the Reformers that without the ordinary means, which was referred to in our confession, that one may easily attain to the highest of the heights of the mysteries of sacred scripture. That is not the belief of the Reformers. For that matter, even our scriptures have something to say about that. Our confession alludes, let me go back a little bit, to 2 Peter 3 .16. Feel free to turn there if you like. 2 Peter 3 .16. I'm going to read from verse 14. Therefore, beloved, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless. And consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation, as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction as they do the rest of the scriptures. Some things in Paul are hard to understand for Peter. Now, this would be very interesting if Peter was, in fact, the first pope, and had very difficulty understanding the apostle Paul, and would proclaim the ability to be the vicar of Christ to the church, and to not have the ability to understand parts of Paul would be very problematic, to say the least. That being said, we cannot escape the reality that some parts of the scripture are hard to understand for people by design. By design. And we will get to that, as to why I say by design, in a little bit. Whitaker emphasizes a very balanced approach to understanding the degree to which we can understand the scriptures. He says this, the unlearned can have some fruit and utility in reading the scriptures. At the same time, he'll say this, not even one jot or tittle is clear without the internal light of the Holy Spirit. And in the interest of humility, he closes with this. A man must be impudent, who would say that he understood even any one book thoroughly, and the same hath ever been said of the opinion of all of us. Do you understand what he's saying there? It would be the height of arrogance for Whitaker for someone to say, I even fully understand one book of the Bible. The height of arrogance. And despite that, despite that strong language, Turton and Whitaker often appeal to the church fathers about the ways in which scripture can be understood, the scope of their understanding. I'll read this quote from Francis Turton. The fathers frequently acknowledge it, although they do not deny that the scriptures have their depths, which ought to excite the studious believers. Chrysostom says the scriptures are so proportioned that even the most ignorant can understand them if only they read them studiously. All necessary things are plain and straight and clear. Augustine says, in the clear declarations, the scriptures are to be found, all things pertaining to faith and practice. Irenaeus says the prophetic and evangelical scriptures are plain and unambiguous. Gregory, a pope, says the scriptures have in public nourishment for children as they serve in secret to strike the loftiest minds with wonder. Indeed, they are like a full and deep river in which the lamb may walk and the elephant may swim. I just find that fascinating. How Rome can simultaneously confess full continuity with the church fathers and not say that, at least in the essentials of the Christian faith, that a lay Christian cannot read and understand the script, I just find that so difficult to just wrestle with. Like, how can you say that you have a sense of continuity with the church fathers when the church fathers themselves say that, at least in the elemental and primary doctrines of the Christian faith, they are clearly propounded in the scriptures? You know what's interesting? The major debater in the Roman Catholic world during the Reformation was Cardinal Bellarmine. You've probably heard his name in the past, maybe even last week.
Evangelism on SermonAudio
A highlight from Matthew 13:31-35 - "The Parables of the Mustard Seed & The Leaven"
"Morning. must have handed in my information to the bulletin wrong because it's the same sermon. I did not go through a theological crisis this week. I don't need a redo. We are in fact moving on. So I'll ask you to turn in Matthew 13. Today we're going to look at verses 31 through to 35. So once you're there then I'll ask you to find that spot in your Bible and then to stand as we read God's word together. And these are the perfect words of God. He put another parable before them saying the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. He told them another parable. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened. All these things Jesus said to the crowds and parables. Indeed he said nothing to them without a parable and this was to fulfill what was spoken by the Prophet. I will open my mouth in parables. I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world and may God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. I think I've shared the story of growing alfalfa this year. As a dairy farmer we feed lots of alfalfa to our cows and so this year I had to put some alfalfa seed in the ground to replace an older stand that we are taking out of production. If you've ever worked with alfalfa you'll know that alfalfa seeds are very very tiny. So tiny in fact that you don't put them in the ground to the moisture. You kind of put them on top of the ground and then kind of harrow it in and then you wait for rain or else they will not germinate. If you go too deep with those little seeds they will not germinate. And as it happened this year we broadcast our alfalfa on great conditions. I harrowed it. I rolled it. Man we're off to a great start. And then no rain. No rain. No rain. No rain. Landmark got rain. Mitchell got rain. We didn't. And it was very very dry and our alfalfa did not germinate. But you know what got a very good head start was every weed that has been on that field for the last 150 years did very very well in that time. And then we have to start making a decision. Okay do we wait for rain and wait for the stuff to germinate or are the weeds gonna snuff it out? And we rolled the dice and we said we're gonna cut those weeds we're gonna chop those weeds into poor silage that our beef farming neighbor can feed to his cows and we're gonna hope that that gives the alfalfa room to germinate. And you know what we did it and it rained and the alfalfa started to come. But the weeds had such a head start that that the next cut was some alfalfa and some weeds and we cut it one more time and you know what we ended this fall with? Was a beautiful thick lush carpet of alfalfa that we hope to harvest next spring. But it did not look good for a long time there. And maybe if the dairy farming picture doesn't work for you this is actually how it works with seeding your lawn as well. Okay? Weeds don't like getting cut. The grass, the alfalfa, can handle it. And I want to suggest this morning as we look at Jesus kingdom parables which are very agricultural so it is with the kingdom of God in history. In Acts 14 22 it says that it is through many tribulations that we must enter the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is again in view in these parables and we've seen Jesus already give a few and he's going to give a few more as we go on. Okay? And to define what is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is everywhere that Christ's rule and reign are present. So one way to say that is the kingdom of God is everywhere. absolutely There is not one corner of the cosmos where the kingdom of God is not. It's everywhere. But it's not seen. It's not visible. It's not acknowledged everywhere. And that is the job of evangelism is to acknowledge it everywhere so that people can see the kingdom not just live in it unknowingly. And so our work as people of God is to make this rule and reign of reality. This is God's creation so of course he's ruler over it but we want people to acknowledge that and to receive it gladly.
Bloomberg Radio New York - Recording Feed
Monitor Show 16:00 11-10-2023 16:00
"Interactive Brokers charges USD margin loan rates from 5 .83 % to 6 .83 % rated the lowest margin fees by stockbrokers .com. Their clients can also earn extra income by lending their fully paid shares of stock. Join Interactive Brokers clients from 200 plus countries and territories to invest in stocks, options, futures, funds, and bonds on 150 global markets. Rates subject to change. Learn more at ibkr .com compare. Hosting a gain on the week. Remember those first three days of the week even though we were in the green it was relatively tepid gains here so the strength that we're seeing here on this Friday really just kind of clawing us back I think to kind of where we were about a week ago. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is gonna finish out the day higher up by about 1 % or about 390 points and change. The S &P 500 higher by about 68 points or 1 .6 % and if an official close above 4400 4415 and change which is also above that 100 day moving average. Meanwhile the NASDAQ composite higher by almost 300 points or 2 % on the day and for once the Russell 2000 decides it actually wants to play along up a percent on the day. Alright well that's pretty broad -based at least in the S &P 500. Peeling back the layer there Scarlett you see 436 stocks in the S &P 500 higher today only 65 moving lower. I feel bad for whoever's doing decliners Scarlett. Yeah that'll be me later on. I look at the New York Stock Exchange almost three stocks higher for everyone that is lower and that it's pretty much reflected in the industry groups as well. Chip companies are the best performers on the day and for the week as well up about five and a half percent this week. Software services and autos that's really Tesla bringing up the rear in terms of the best three performing groups. In terms of laggards because all the industry groups are higher food beverage and tobacco telecom and farmers so the more traditional defensive sectors are not doing as well today. Alright let's take a look at what's going on.
Hearing Jesus: Daily Bible Study
A highlight from 419// Telling The Difference Between Weeds and Wheat: A Devotional Bible Study on Matthew 13:24-30
"Do you sometimes doubt if you're truly hearing God's voice or if it's really your own? Or have you been in a season where it feels like He's completely silent? Have you been praying for a way to learn how to hear His voice more clearly? Hey friends, I'm Rachel, host of the Hearing Jesus Podcast. If you are ready to grow in your faith and to confidently step into your identity in Christ, then join me as we dig deep into God's Word so you can learn to live out your faith in your everyday life. You may be familiar with The Salvation Army by the Bells We Ring at Christmas, but did you know that we also produce a network of Christian shows you can listen to on your favorite podcast store? One of those shows, Words of Life, is currently in a series on parenting. We'll be joined by families at all stages of parenting to hear their testimony and what they've learned along the way. We've realized that we are her first experience with faith, you know, and what she sees in us, and we're really mindful of how we react to things and how we speak. I've always thought, like, I'm not raising this kid to just grow up, right? I'm raising them to be a fully grown adult who is functional in society. As a father, as a parent, I feel my goal in life is to share the very best parts of me. Those values that you guys instilled in us certainly is something that we give to ours. Find Words of Life wherever you get your podcasts, or visit WordsOfLifePodcast .org to start listening. This holiday, the Home Depot is helping you get gifts that keep on giving by making sure they keep on going. Right now, when you buy a select battery kit from Ryobi, Milwaukee, RIDGID, DeWalt, or Makita, you get an eligible tool for free. Just pick a brand, pick a battery kit, and get a tool free. Give the gift of more doing this holiday with the Home Depot. How doers get more done. Valued at participating stores and online, one per transaction. Discount taken at checkout. Full, eligible tool list in store and online. Valued October 23rd, 2023 through January 28th, 2024. Hey friends, welcome back to the Hearing Jesus Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Grohl. Today we are continuing our discussion of Matthew Chapter 13. So if you're just joining us and this is your first time listening to the podcast, welcome. We're glad you're here. What we're doing is we're in a series of an introduction to the Gospels where I'm walking through the Gospel of Matthew and chapter by chapter, verse by verse, we're talking about some of the things that we easily overlook because we are in a different time and space than the original audience was. And the reason why we do that is because there are things that the original audience, Jewish living people in a farming community would have understood that is sometimes lost on us. And so I want to point some of those things out to help you understand how this message of the Gospel is relevant to you in your life today. If you would like to dive a little bit deeper, we have resources available for you every day. There are journal prompts that go along with each episode as well as a family discussion guide, and you can get the links for that in the show notes. And then we also offer spiritual direction and one on one life coaching to help you dive That's what you're interested in. You can go to shears .org for that as well. So we are in Matthew chapter 13, and we're picking back up at verse 24. It says, Jesus told them another parable. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed seeds among the wheat and went away. When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared. The owner servants came to him and said, Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where did the weeds come from? An enemy did this, he replied. The servants asked him, Do you want us to go and pull them up? No, he said, because while you were pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time, I will tell the harvesters first collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned, then gather wheat and bring it to my barn. So at first glance, this may feel very similar to what we studied yesterday, which was the parable of the soils. And I would encourage you to go back and listen to yesterday's episode if you haven't done that so far. But it's the same theme, but it means something a little bit different. And you have to remember who this audience was that Jesus was speaking to. This original audience was a group of people that likely were farmers. And in that time frame, there was a lot of wealthy landowners that controlled most of that rural land throughout the I mean, that was throughout the Roman Empire, not just in this location. But their estates were worked either by free peasants or by slaves. And honestly, essentially, most of their situations were very, very similar. The only difference would be the fact that the slaves could be beaten or sold. But as far as their stature and their status in life, they live very similar lives. And so many of the hearers of Jesus that were in this crowd would have been rural farmers on these larger estates. And they would have really identified with this situation that he's describing. So they would have identified with the soil story from yesterday. And then this story about the weeds, they would have understood what the struggle was about. And before we get into that, I just want to make note about a couple things. First, the crop that's going to be produced in the life of the person who is good soil. So this is going back to what we talked about yesterday, this idea of good soil. The crop is for the kingdom of heaven to operate. And many think that that crop is referring to converts, people that are one to Christ through the believer. And yes, that is partially true. But in this context, it goes a little bit deeper to this more fundamental idea of transformation of the person who has encountered this kingdom of heaven experience. And so in the forest soil yesterday, we were talking about the four kinds of soil in the forest soil. That crop represents the working of the Holy Spirit inside the life of that seed or you and I, that person, that seed falls on good soil. And so there's a reference there to this production of good fruit. And later in Galatians, we'll study this. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can go there and read in Galatians chapter five about the fruit of the Spirit and what that is. It is the gifts of the Spirit within the believer's life. And that results in these characteristics that are produced by the Spirit of God working through the life of the believer. And so this external creation of this kind of Spirit produced righteousness and these good works that are done, they're now coming up through these new converts where it's not just about them praying a prayer or them making the decision to follow Jesus, but it's about them producing good fruit, a good crop, a good harvest, the fruit of their lives. And so that's what we want to look for when we're talking about good soil is not just the fact that somebody receives that word, but that they internalize it and they develop this relationship with Christ. So as we're going through a couple of things in verse 25, it says about while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed seeds among the wheat and went away. Now, in that culture, they often would sleep after lunch, but most of the time, the greatest length of time that they would be sleeping would be at night. And either way, it could have happened at either time at lunchtime or even at nighttime. But this was something that was very common in that timeframe. Ancient farmers sometimes fought. Sometimes it would be over land. Sometimes it would be over relationships. Lots of different things, money. And a Roman law had to actually forbid this practice of sowing poisonous seeds into a neighbor's field. And so do you have to think about what was their diet? The most basic staple of their diet in the entire ancient world was what? So wheat was critical. And most of the time we're talking about seed, we're talking about wheat. And so what the enemy or the neighbor that wanted to get back at his neighbor would do is he would also plant a poisonous weed, which is a kind of a rye grass known as Darnell. And it looks like wheat, especially in the early stages. And you can really only tell the difference once the ear appears, once the fruit appears. See, Satan operates in this world, both as the swooping bird that we saw yesterday that swooped down and stole the seed and also as that enemy farmer. And so what this parable is doing is emphasizing the fact that the enemy will plant things just alongside of where God is planting. And what does that look like? Well, it's evil intentions. It's lies. His influence is right alongside those who are spreading God's word. And the interesting thing about this, and you will hear a lot about this if you are operating within the church, within the body of Christ or serving God, is there's a lot of times a demonic oppression or attack against God's people, especially when they are called to share God's word. It's predictable. We call it predictable resistance. And quite often what will happen is the moment that you are getting ready to stand out and stand up in obedience to what God has called you to do, the enemy will attack.
The Doug Collins Podcast
Why War in the Middle East Is a Threat to All Americans
"That I know our immigration system is broken. I'm one of the first to admit our immigration system, our legal immigration system is broken. There are people who would like to come to the United States, who we would love to have in the United States, who bring skills, they bring opportunity, they bring hope. Those are the folks that you want to come here. They will assimilate into our culture and our systems and are great and wondrous people. Those are the people who built this country from the ground up. We need agricultural guest worker programs. We need things to make sure that our agriculture is picked and our farmers can sustain their growth. These are all vital purposes that are broken right now in the United States. Our visa system is broken. Most of the ones, over half of the illegal immigrants, it may not be now that as much as coming across the southern border, but at least half of the illegal immigrants into our country are here because the government at one point gave them a visa and said, you can be here. Now think about that for a second. We've given them a piece of paper and said, you can be here for a set amount of time. They get here. They like it. They like the freedoms. They like everything they see here. And for some of them coming from countries in which they don't experience those freedoms, they say, you know, we will stay. Neither some will get married, some will do others, but some will just stay. That is a group of people that we have in our country that are not supposed to be here, but make up about half of the illegal immigrant population. The other illegal immigrant population is crossing over our borders. Very few from the north, but the ones from the north, but all are mostly from the south. Now in the south, the numbers have been jaw dropping under the Biden administration. Biden administration says they're doing everything. We've had Tom Homan's on here. We've had others on this program to talk about this. But what we're finding is that this is, it's just a lie. When you tell people come here and everything's going to be okay, then the people are going to come. I mean, it's just like, if you open the door, they will come. And that's exactly what they're doing. Our US -Mexico border is where this is really finding itself out. Over the past few years, we've had, you know, almost every country in the world has been represented at our southern border. So do not let the Democrats spin line that this is just about Mexico and the Central American countries. No, it is not. We have Venezuelans, we have Cubans, we have people from the Middle East, they're all coming through our southern border. Why? Because they know they can get through it. And if this is a concern, when you have the Hamas terrorists, the Hezbollah terrorists, you have the Al Qaeda fighters, you have ISIS fighters, you have all of these going on. And we have two million plus getaways, gotaways in which we don't know where they are, who they're from, or where they came from, or what they wanted to do here in the United States. And we're starting to see the Palestinian, we've seen these revolts and these protests on campuses and our streets and everywhere else. You're seeing Palestinians beating Israel, Israeli, U .S. citizens, we're seeing Jews being ostracized, we're seeing Jews fearful on college campuses. This is all coming from who knows what. Are there areas in which we have a perspective of these terrorists in the United States with sales that could be looking to broaden this conflict that is right now centered in Israel and the Gaza region and the north, the Lebanon Hezbollah. CBP San Diego field office just this week sent out an internal intel bulletin last week that said alerting its officers to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad foreign fighters inspired by the Israeli conflict may be encountered at the U .S. Southern border and it gives officers an instruction on what to look for, single military men under undetermined travel plans. You're seeing this one, some will scream you're targeting them. No, it's being safe, it's being cautious, it's doing due diligence, it's making sure that our communities are safe because here is the problem. If they are coming here, and at this point, unfortunately, we have no reason to think that there may not be, maybe it's the best way to put this, terrorists already here who are either waiting calls, remember, if you don't think this can happen, just think back to 9 -11. We have to be in due diligence. So for everyone who believes that this is not their problem, not something that is going to affect you here in the United States, this is something else, it's somebody else's war, why are we worried about somebody else's problem? Then I'll simply just turn to you and say, look, they are here and imagine, God forbid, something happens here.
She Podcasts
A highlight from 401 Beach Weather
"Hey everyone, welcome to She Podcast. This is episode 401. I am your co -host Jessica Kupferman and with it, as always, the very scantily clad Elsie Escobar today. Oh my God. It looks like you're wearing a bathing suit, kind of, that's all. I am not. It's the spaghetti straps. It's my spaghetti. It's the spaghetti straps tank. I'm dressed like something I don't think I've ever dressed like before. I look sporty today, which is rare for me, but it's because I'm wearing a muscle shirt that says no filter and I just came back from the beach. So I'm tan and I'm so tan, I'm still almost nowhere near tan as tan as Elsie Escobar, which is what I'm used to because that's impossible at this point. How are you? I'm well, I like how we actually match. So for those of you who are curious, you can definitely watch us stream live on Facebook and on YouTube to see that we're actually wearing the same color. You also look very refreshed, says Patrick Keller, which is nice. Patrick, I wish I could just have you move here and put you in my pocket all day. You're just delightful. I just adore him. Thank you for that. I do look refreshed. I hope so. It was not as refreshing of a vacation as I'd have liked because we drove down there in a potential tornado and drove home in terrible air quality. And so in between there, I got to sit on the beach like for a day and a half. But yeah, it was nice not to think about work for a little while. I'm still not really thinking about it, but I do like recording with Elsie. It's like, I can't say no to that. It's my favorite part of the week. So she's taking a drink of some kind of sludge in a, I know it's my, it's my smoothie that looks kind of, it's not a little bit on the disgusting. I think she goes outside and finds what's in the ground and then just shoves it in with like bananas and milk. And that's what she's got. A smoothie. It's like a smoothie. It's a dirt smoothie. I make my smoothies with water. Truth be told. Hello, Facebook user. Let us know what your name is. Facebook user. Cause we are looking at your notes here on now notes, your comments on StreamYard. And we can't see necessarily who it is on Facebook every time, but it's wonderful to see you guys or for you to see us, I guess. So thank you. Yeah. So yes. So we are back from our hiatus. We've had w like we did episode 400 and then immediately stopped recording as if we had achieved some goal and we no longer needed to. Yeah. Yeah. It's Missy. Hi Missy. How are you? So yeah. So we're back. We didn't go anywhere. We haven't quit. We just, I just needed, I just needed some time to not think about she podcasts for a little bit. I probably still need a little bit of time for that. And actually I found myself this weekend, like, so like the, the vacation was great, but as soon as I got home, I found myself feeling that twang of I should be doing something for the event. You know, like I'm like, it's like if I have a five minute downtime, I immediately have a pang of panic that I'm not doing something. And then I'm like, Oh wait, no, I'm not supposed to be doing anything right now. I don't have to do anything. Oh yeah, that's great. But I've, I've really noticed much how it has affected my process of thinking around here, which is I can't do X, Y, and Z because I should be working. It's really interesting. Oh, Karen says she's been heard a few sessions in real time and she's listening to a few since that's wonderful. I hope you guys are enjoying the, those of you who participated in the virtual event. I hope you're enjoying it. I have not put the recordings on sale yet. I just haven't what we're doing next because it, yeah, but I think I actually, I would love to hear from you as to, I know that you were just sharing, like you're catching up with all that stuff. First of all, where have you been? So after you, after you finished doing the thing, right? What happened? What happened right after you finished She Podcast Live? I think the moment I hit stop, I went upstairs to bed because it was like 8 PM and, uh, or maybe 6 30 PM. And then I, that was a Thursday, Friday. I woke up very late and then Saturday we did some shopping and then Sunday I had to go to my husband's grandmother's 99th birthday party. Oh, if you've never been to a 99th birthday party, I can tell you it's not a surprise. Nobody's partying down, but they did have open bar and, um, you know, for bloody Mary's it was nice. It was a brunch. It was very nice. And, uh, it's amazing that anyone could live to be 99 and be fashionable and drive herself places. And she does all those things, Cynthia. And actually she's an, she was an art teacher. So a lot of her art students were there and they showed some of her artwork and actually one of the, um, party favors were Lenny little mini framed versions of her paintings, which I thought was really cool. So yeah, there's a lot of art to stick a talent in his family. Oh, Catherine says we went to a 99th barbecue yesterday. It's so fun and meaningful. It is, it is. I mean, she stood up to do, I hope nobody tells it. She stood up to do a speech and I thought she started talking about all the stuff she remembered or not. And I think I texted Elsie, like, I think we're going to hear everything that's ever happened in her life. Now. It was nice knowing you. I'll see you in like a year because you can't, it's hard to sum up 99 years, but no, she didn't. She was very humble and modest and lovely. She's a lovely lady. I've always loved his grandmother. So that was good. And then we just went to the beach and I've been at the beach from all last week, Monday through Friday, I got home Friday and then I've just been either hunkered up because of the air quality or at the pool. So you were affected by the air quality as well. Yeah. It was actually really bad right where I live. So I actually, in fact, let me tell you something, a story it's Wednesday. I was at the beach. There was no air quality problem. It was a perfectly blue sky, perfectly white clouds. You can see the great that, you know, the contrast between the colors and the next day, even though it was sunny, no sky, no colors, no blue, no clouds, no nothing. You can't see shit. You can see the sun, but it's like, it's like almost like your glasses are blurry. And that's how I'm like, wow. The air. I mean, you can literally see it. That's the first time I've seen a difference, I think, because up here in Delaware, it's, you know, we go back and forth between having that haze. Like I can see blue over here, but I see a little haze over in that window. So it's getting better. But yeah, we're really affected by it up here in the tri -state area for some reason. And I think because it's near the ocean and the wind blows it right into the ocean. So it's like it passes through me, us. Like I'm, if you were in Pittsburgh, you would be having it too. Cause it passes right through. It's like all through Pennsylvania and then Delaware, Maryland, and then whoosh out to sea. Cheryl said, I was in Denver last week with blue skies and we had those gray skies in Wisconsin. I was happy. I missed it. Yeah. It's like kind of unnerving. And like because I was at the beach and we were lucky enough to be beachfront, like the day we woke up and it was like 150, there's like a level of air quality that's bad. And Scott says, you know, cause he's asthmatic, ideally it should be under 50 for him to go outside. And it was like 150 and there's all these people on the beach and it's so hard to explain to your kid, like, no, they just don't, you know, care about their, like, it's hard to explain why you are taking caution and no one else is, you know, like you could see kids playing and he's like, but everyone's playing on the beach. And I'm like, right. But they're blurry though because of smoke. Like you can, you know, like they, they may not have, yeah, they may not have a problem. Is Karen saying, aren't you at bad risk for weather today? We had a tornado. I, again, I texted, I don't know why I always text Elsie during the terrible things, but like, again, I texted her last night and I was like, there is a confirmed tornado on the ground a mile from me. Yeah. Here's all my passwords. It was nice knowing you like, yeah. Never make this person a speaker. Okay. Goodbye. Oh my God. It was so weird because you literally said that to me and I kind of like, are you alive? Like after I saw, cause it was supposed to be the warning happened after a specific time. I, and then she didn't text me back till I was asleep. I was like, I'm not, I'm not even going to know if she's alive until I wake up in the morning. I was trying to calm down Isaac who was like shaking and like we're going to die. We're going to die. Yeah, I hear wait. So was Isaac hearing the wind outside? Is that why he was shaking or was it because you told him? I was putting him to bed and like an Amber alert. That's how, have you ever had an Amber alert come through on your phone? It is. This was three times as long and three times as loud and it scared the shit out of him. He was like, what's going on? What's wrong? What's wrong? And I was like, Oh, there's a tornado warning. And then Scott texted me, should we go to the basement? And so we all went downstairs to the family room to watch the news to see if we needed to go to the basement. And that's why he was scared because it sort of jolted him out of his like Daisy dreamy have a good night phase. So yeah, Patrick saying it was really bad here in St Louis or my throat was sore just from going in and out. Yeah, I was nauseous the day that we ended up going shopping the day there was bad air quality at the beach and just going in and out of the car was, it was nauseating. So yeah, as far as bad weather today, yeah, there's not a tornado warning anymore. Thank God. But it does say severe weather and flooding. And I guess I just have to get used to it. Like I posted on Facebook, like I go down there with a tornado warning, something that we in Maryland don't experience often, you know, in Delaware. Like, I mean, there was one here in April, but other than that, I don't remember ever having one. This is in Kansas, you know, so we go down there with a tornado warning and we come back with bad air quality. And I mean, like, I guess this is just our life now. I guess my life is just I mean, I already checked the weather because I'm interested in it. But like, I guess now I have to really see like are any outdoor activities possible today, tomorrow, this weekend, like, I've read that all summer, we're going to be going in between tornadoes and haze, tornadoes and haze. That's a shitty summer. I don't want to be like all like catastrophic. But that's like really just what's going to be the life from now on. I know that's what I'm saying. It's like, I don't want to. I mean, yeah, I really don't want it to be this way. And then, yeah, I mean, so, yeah, that's just our lives now. And then it's like, well, where can we move where the weather's not going to affect us? California. Oh, wait, that's where all the smog is. That's where it's all coming from. Oh, shit. That's not it. Yeah, it's just going to hide from it now. No, even like, I mean, here we had we weirdly enough, we went into town on Friday. And while we were in town, we were there the whole day. So while we were in town, I got text messages from my electric company saying that we lost power. Mind you, we were in town, so it didn't really matter. Right. And I was thinking like, what? Why? Right. Because it was actually a pretty decent day where we were. And was it raining up there or why in Asheville? So wait. So we were driving back and it said, oh, you got the power back. I was like, oh, OK, great, great. So we were driving back and then we pull in and we have no power. It was like late. It was like quarter to eight. And then I had just gotten another text message. But for the minute we lost power. But mind you, while we were driving up, trees were down, branches were everywhere, like leaves everywhere. And we were just sitting going, what happened to me? It's like I know it's like you went into another dimension and came back to your home. Like it's weird when there's weather right not far from where you were. Isn't that weird? Yeah, it was crazy. So it was very because trees fell down and they took the lines out from both directions and all over my yard. There were all these random leaves and branches. And so we were like, OK, something did happen up here. And that's why we don't have power. And it did come back like closer to, I think, nine thirty is when we got our power back. So we weren't without power for too long. So Cheryl says, oh, he's saying he loves the June gloom. Cheryl saying her husband's a farmer. So watching weather a few days out is his everyday life for me. I'm like, well, I'll see what's happening. So I'm like weather obsessed regardless of if it's dramatic or not. I've just come to the like acceptance that I just love drama, not all drama in general. I mean, like not toxic drama, but like if someone else's drama is interesting, I'm totally down to hear the whole thing without because I'm not involved and I don't care. And with weather, it's kind of like that. Like I love that there's a thunderstorm or a hurricane somewhere because like I'm in my house, I should I should be fine. It's not going to affect me. So but I do like to watch a couple of days in advance. And when I was a kid, we had a screen in porch with my dad and I would sit out on the screen in porch and watch thunderstorms. And it felt like being in it because it was just screens. You know, we were dry, but we were like in the thunderstorm and that was pretty cool. So I do like a good thunderstorm. I don't like the idea that a tornado is going to blow a tree through my front door, though, or, you know, my windows. But for the most part, I love weather. So I like to see when it's going to rain. I love when it snows, which didn't happen here at all this winter. Did you get snow at all? Me? No, we got nothing again. Like we might have gotten like a little frost a couple of days, but that's about the extent of it. He says, I feel guilty for loving storms and bad weather. Don't feel guilty. It's just the same as if you love drama. Don't you love when your friend is like, let me tell you about what my sister did, you know, or whatever. Like, I love that shit. I don't want to know about like political drama, but I do like knowing about personal drama and, you know, and helping solve personal drama for people. Like, I think I'm pretty good at that. So like, I enjoy hearing about and I feel like weather is like, people get very dramatic about weather. So I love what reading Facebook, when there's weather. I love seeing what people are hoarding from the grocery store when there's weather like the drama then people get all up in a tizzy like it's fascinating to me. I mean, you shouldn't feel guilty, Patrick. I think it just indicates that you're like, you know, you're interested in for me, it's being interested in human behavior and how they react to like, potential disaster. I just think it's interesting anyway. It's funny how like you like, you're saying like you love the drama. And I'm like, why are you not more obsessed with reality TV then? Because it's because that's not real. Oh, yes, it is. No, it's not. Oh, my God. You totally missed out on the entire scandal situation. You literally read like the ones you didn't even. So everybody who is into reality TV, you knows what scandal about scandal is and you missed out on it. And it was probably like it usurped my life from March until a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure. I'm like, I'm serious. You know, it's real, though. I just know it was. It was absolutely 100 percent. That's why everybody was so obsessed with it and why everybody's jaw dropped on the floor is because it was so real. It was spell it scanned of all S C A N D O V A L V A L. It was through Vanderpump Rules. Vanderpump Rules. OK. The thing is, there was a cheating scandal that nobody really knew about. OK. And it came out and like the actual cast members also didn't know about it either. Neither did the production team and everybody was blown away. And then it happened right when the season began.
Bankless
A highlight from 193 - Lyn Alden's Masterclass On Money
"The cool part of this story is that we've actually never seen such a transition from money to money, fiat money to crypto money, assuming we're all headed towards crypto money. It's never been such a big transition of wealth up to this point and so we have a bunch of patterns of Bitcoin, there's scarcity that's provable scarcity, there is the communications network that is the Bitcoin network, there's just a lot of things that rhyme, but just what about this crypto future gives you such confidence that this is where we're going? Welcome to Bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams, I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless. What is money? That is the question on today's episode. You can't understand crypto until you understand money. That's why this is a core episode on the bankless journey and this is one for the beginners and the veterans alike. I think you're both going to learn something. Understanding money is the starting point to understanding crypto and that's why this is a canonical episode for bankless. We brought the best person in the world to walk us through this understanding. Lin Alden is on the episode today. Here are a few things we discuss. Number one, what is money? Where did it come from? Number two, commodity versus credit money. Which model of money is correct? Number three, why money is the ultimate game of survival of the fittest. Very Darwinistic. Number four, how the banks came to be. Number five, how those same banks became central bankers and why they keep rugging us, including some of the most recent examples. Number six, the fraying of the current fiat money system and the birth of crypto monies. And number seven, how Lin thinks this will all play out in the future. David, this is a jam packed episode. What was the significance to you? The story arc of money and I consider to be pretty synonymous with the story arc of humanity. Society doesn't talk about what money is nearly enough. Money should be taught in schools. It should be taught in universities. The concept that question what is money has such rich answers that talk to so many other adjacent academic studies like human anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics, finance. If you can answer the question of what is money you answer so many other questions about so many just laws of the way that the world works as well as just being able to understand history and also be a good capital allocator. It's weird that so many capital allocators out there can't answer the question what is money and I think that's one of the big advantages that crypto people have over other capital allocators is because they go one level deeper understanding what capital actually is. What is money? What is the form factors that allows money to emerge? In this episode Lin Alden does a fantastic job of guiding us through history and I think we could just do so many more episodes like this around the subject of money because it's a question with infinite answers. Big confession I didn't understand money before I got into crypto and I think crypto is the best way to actually learn what money is in all of those adjacent areas that David just mentioned. We're gonna talk about this episode of course as we always do David during the debrief episode which if you are a bankless citizen is available for you now right on the bankless premium feed you can upgrade to bankless citizenship and get access to that right now. Okay guys we're gonna get right into our episode with Lin Alden but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible including our number one place to buy crypto money that is Kraken our recommended exchange for 2023. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro you'll have access to advanced charting tools real -time market data and lightning fast trade execution all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs visit pro .kraken .com to get started today. Metamask portfolio is your one -stop shop to navigate the world of DeFi and now bridging seamlessly across networks doesn't have to be so daunting anymore. With competitive rates and convenient routes Metamask portfolio's bridge feature lets you easily move your tokens from chain to chain using popular layer one and layer two networks and all you have to do is select the network you want to bridge from and where you want your tokens to go. From there Metamask vets and curates the different bridging platforms to find the most decentralized accessible and reliable bridges for you. To tap into the hottest opportunities in crypto you need to be able to plug into a variety of networks and nobody makes that easier than Metamask portfolio. Instead of searching endlessly through the world of bridge options click the bridge button on your Metamask extension or head over to metamask .io slash portfolio to get started. Arbitrum is accelerating the web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a web3 gaming hub and social dapps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own layer 3 giving you access to interoperable customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum .io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction -free. Bankless nation today we are honored to have Lynn Alden back on the podcast. Lynn is the best person alive at explaining money, at least that is according to me. What it is, how it came to be, where it's going, and she's done so quite thoroughly in her new book titled Broken Money. Here it is. Got on my desk. It's a big one folks and it's absolutely fantastic. Lynn, welcome to Bankless. How are you doing? Thanks. I'm always happy to come on. Glad you enjoyed the book and it's certainly been a fun journey to write it and research it. Well I think that the reason we are doing this podcast, the reason we wanted to bring you on, is because money is critically important. I think it might be the most used but least understood technology that we have and it's also key for the crypto journey, for the Bankless journey. So before you can invest in crypto with any kind of conviction, I am convinced you absolutely need to understand money. Can you answer the question why is gold valuable, right? Why is the US dollar the world's reserve currency? If you can't answer those questions, I don't know that you're ready to actually invest in crypto with conviction. So this in some ways is the first step on the Bankless journey is understanding money. So we're super excited to walk through that story today and get all of the history and context. So Lynn, I think I want to start with the first question and maybe we could do things the way you did things in your book which is kind of chronological, but the most basic fundamental question in our mind today at the beginning of this episode. What is money? So I think the old -school definition of money remains very appropriate today, which is that it's a medium of exchange, liquid store value, and unit of account. It's basically a signaling mechanism. It's a ledger that we use to communicate value, to store value, to transfer value, and it's generally that useful intermediate state between things we're going to consume or more risky or illiquid assets you might want to own longer term. It is this liquid medium that we use. Like you said, it's very important technology. Another way of kind of framing that is that money is that which solves the need for barter and avoids the double coincidence of wants. And so in a world without money, any form of money, if we wanted to trade with each other, let's say we were in a more primitive context and we want to trade something, we have to find something that I have extra of that you are deficient in and that you have extra of something that I'm deficient in, right? So it's actually kind of a hard combination. There's so many frictions or ways that trade can fail. And so generally there's two main ways to lubricate trade, to basically reduce the frictions there. One would be deferring transactions across time. And so for example, if you need something now but I don't need something from you right now, I'm pretty good and I have some surpluses, I could give it to you either because I'm banking up some social savings or in another context we could formalize it so that you owe me something in the future. So I'm taking on some degree of counterparty risk but I'm basically kind of in my way stockpiling savings and you're getting a need met. And the other way to do it is to have a kind of a super commodity, a liquid, scarce, portable, divisible unit that we never really have too much of. Like how many people complain about having too many gold coins or too many dollars, for example? We can always use more. There's only so much furniture I want. There's only so much, you know, another house would be a burden. There's only so many financial things or consumable things that I want but portable, dense, liquid stores of value I can always use more of. And so in a hunter -gatherer concept or context, generally shell beads were among the earliest types of money which is that if you don't know what else to trade, various types of hard -to -make portable ornamentation served as money. They were kind of the invention of liquid savings, the invention of store value because you could always have more of them. They were wearable which increased their portability, they were small, they were dense, they were divisible. And so basically if you have one commodity that all trades can be denominated in, that makes other trades easier too. So there's really kind of different camps about what money is and they both mainly arise from the two primary ways to solve the double coincidence of wants which is either that time deferment or that universal unit of account. Okay, so we have this double coincidence of wants where I'm a blacksmith, you're an apple farmer, you want my sword, I want some of your apples to feed my family. So what do we do in those cases? Or maybe actually I don't want the apples, maybe I have enough apples would be, you know, more accurate. Well, I could give you the sword and I don't want any of your apples, maybe I have enough apples, I want to buy some wheat. And there's two ways for us to make that transaction. One is an IOU. You could say, hey, Ryan, I owe you one, you know, I'll get you more apples next season when your family really needs it. And that's kind of the idea of credit -based money, IOU -based money. Or the other is we formalize across our society some sort of super commodity, beads, shells, maybe later on a silver or a gold, or something that the entire society recognizes as incredibly valuable, right, some super commodity, and that solves that problem and that completes the transaction. And that's the basis of the two forms of money, right, and the two theories of money, the commodity -based money, which is like a gold or a beads or a shells, and then also the credit -based money, which would be in the form of the IOU. Yeah, they've often been in opposition. Different economists or theorists will have different ideas about what money is, but they're both solving the same general problem, which is making trade easier between parties that don't necessarily want what the other one has and storing value. And what they have in common is that they're both ledgers and there's just different maintainers of that ledger. So if you're relying on a super commodity, you're relying on nature to set the boundaries for that ledger. How hard are the units to make and the ledgers updated with physical possession, right? So there's only so much gold in a region, make it into gold coins. We're bounded by the parameters of nature. Nobody can just print more gold. And so we're kind of relying on nature to set the bounds of that ledger. Or if we're relying on credit, then we're relying on our—depending on what size we're doing, it could be our tribe, could be in Babylon, the temples had this more extensive clay tablet ledger system. Today we have central banks. Whatever scale you're working at, you're relying on humans' ability to control that ledger, to come to an agreement on the ledger. Sometimes there could be competing ledgers. And so money is in many ways an emergent phenomenon in the sense that it's not an accident that we pick gold rather than apples as money. Anyone who tries to pick apples as money is going to have a really bad time and it's going to select itself out. But there's also occasionally, or now more frequently, top -down impositions of money where they get to kind of find local monopolies if they have the power to do so. But then, of course, on an international scale, even those monopolies are competing with other monopolies for money. So money is still a market when you zoom out in the global sense. I really want to drill down into that emergent phenomenon because I think that's one of the reasons why the story of money is so cool. Emergent phenomenons are complex and they're nuanced and they have different parameters based on the variables in which they arise. Talking about just like this idea of credit -based money where like Ryan's got something that I want but I don't have something that he wants, but since him and I have a social relationship, I can just owe him one. And that is something based on trust. And that works because of the relationship that Ryan and I have. And that starts to create some sort of credit -based money. When we talk about the other end of the spectrum, the super commodity money, that credit, that relationship that I have with Ryan, the technology of money can embody that relationship with someone that I don't have that relationship with. So there's this, you know, the barter myth, the meme is that like, okay, we all have these like goods, but there's no money substrate. And so like we all come together and be like, hey, let's just pick up money because it's easier to barter. From understanding like the history of human progression, it's kind of like that, but it's also just a little bit not like that because money has come about in so many different ways based on just like the size of the tribe and the actual money, like what is the thing that is being transacted. Can you talk about just like the different ways that money emerges to facilitate a need? Sure. So there's been different schools of thought on that and we get more evidence over time. And generally the way I would summarize it is that barter is so inefficient that it rarely rises naturally. And when it does arise, it's usually things are not going great and it's usually like a temporary phenomenon. And so money emerged so early because barter was a problem so early. So it's not like we had this long era of barter. And then we invented money. Yeah. So that's kind of the original thought is when you looked at, say, some of the early commodity theorists, they were like imagining like a blacksmith and a bread maker and then being like, yeah, these guys must have had a lot of frictions as they try to figure what to do. But of course, when you go back in history, it was never like that. You never had a society with like blacksmiths and bread makers and no money. And so money is literally the earliest known example might be the Lambos Cave in Africa. It's over 70 ,000 years old. There's evidence of colored shell beads. The people discovering it were saying that might be the earliest case of information stored outside of the brain. And so basically going back a very long time, either proto -collectibles like proto - money or just groups of credit, groups of deferring a gift culture, deferring transactions, banking up social savings, keeping tracks of deeds and debts in a society. These have been the two main ways to do it. And like you said, basically, if you have relationships with the person that you're trading with, that's when credit can be more useful. Whereas commodity money is more useful if you're dealing with strangers. So in this case, it's almost like credit's the closed source version. You need to be like permissioned in this group for it to make sense. Whereas commodity money is like the open source one, like you can go up to a stranger and if you have a gold coin or dollar bill or a useful kind of portable object of some sort, you can trade with them even if you have no relationship with each other. And it's also a way to store value long -term that's not a liability. So if you're holding credit for long -term, you're relying on the social structure to be there, the people that owe those liabilities or remember your deeds to remember them. Your asset is someone else's ongoing liability. Whereas if you have final settlement with something more physical, like a gold coin or a shell bead or something, you have an asset that's an unencumbered asset. It's not someone else's liability. You own it full and clear. It's not reliant on the ongoing memory or liability of someone else. And so what we generally see in complex societies is that you have both types of money working together. So usually a commodity defines the unit of account. So in ancient Babylon, you had small bits of silver, you had a meal worth of grain. For example, these would be kind of the unit of account that people would think in and be defined as. And then you'd either have the physical transfer of the commodities themselves as money or, often to make that easier, you'd have credit built on top of that as well. So it's not like every single time a transaction has to take place, a physical commodity has to change hands. You can simply record it orally or in writing and then settle up at a later time or reciprocate later. And so if you have credit without a commodity money or out of a unit of account, you're kind of just recreating barter. If the Apple farmer is trading around Apple credits and the bread maker is trading around bread credits, you're still kind of stuck in this barter situation. There's no super unit of account to which to make sense of stuff in because you need a specific credit. You need to find someone that wants this Apple credit, someone else that wants this bread credit. That's a mess. And so instead, you tend to see a standardized unit of account or a couple units of account and then credit facilities built on top of that. And that's historically how complex societies seem to have arose. And even going into the modern era, that's still generally how things work on the international scale. And as money has developed, it's kind of developed alongside just the progression of humans. I think one of the important ways that I think we really want to express in this episode that money is a technology and that technology improves over time. And it improves both on the commodity unit of account that we use as well as the technology of the ledger that we used on the credit system. So both can kind of be different technological innovations in parallel along with the rise of other technologies of human civilization and different needs and different eras in human history produce different contexts for different types of money technology to emerge. Ultimately, that technology is about, in my mind, connecting more people in a trustless manner. Because, like you said, that unencumbered asset of a commodity money means that, you know, whereas in credit, it takes two to tango, in a commodity money, it will actually it's a bare asset. It's just like dependent on one single person. Can you talk about the progression of the technology of money throughout human history when we were small in tribe in network where maybe credit kind of dominated because social relationships were known? But then there's a story arc here of as money progresses, as the technology of money progresses, that is alongside the overall scaling of human civilization, correct? Yeah, sure. And I think there's kind of two parallel avenues there of technological development. One is the underlying commodity unit of account itself and then one is the records on how to maintain, you know, lists of who owns what. And so if we look at the commodities themselves, things like shell beads or teeth or grains, things like that, they would be early types of money. But then as societies go through more levels of industrialization, they get better at making more of these kind of lower tech types of money. If you have industrialization, if you have metal tools, if you have hydrocarbons, you can harvest and make a lot more shell beads or things like that. And so you can dilute and devalue those that are in a less technology setting, still relying on those. And so when we think of money as an emergent phenomenon, it's like evolution in the sense that things are you know, someone holds this thing as money and no one else knows how to dilute that. If they pick the wrong thing as money, they get diluted because someone else says, well, I'm gonna go make more of that. Other people seem to like it. And so if we all have a shared delusion and we all pick paper clips as money, it only takes a couple people to realize that we're all idiots and they can just make a ton more paper clips and devalue us. Whereas if we pick gold as money, it's really, really hard for other people to figure out how to just, you know, make more gold. And so as human technology improved, we kind of moved up the scale of hardness from things like shells all the way up to gold. It's a weird combination because the money has to be liquid, saleable, divisible, identifiable. So it's got to be common enough that everybody's seen it, people can access it, it's around, but you can't increase the supply significantly. So super rare things like meteorites or rhodium don't have the liquidity or visibility to serve as money, even though they might be a good store of value or interesting collectible. Whereas something like gold and silver, they've met the characteristics where there's a lot of it in existence, but it's hard to increase the supply more at a fast rate. And so that's been one technological avenue of money. The other one is the ledgers that we used to record that. And so obviously in the early days, it would have been oral ledgers, you know, in your own tribe. And then you had the development of writing, so clay tablets, parchment, things like that, that you could write down lists of transactions, lists of debts, lists of assets, and some sort of central authority like in Babylon, the temple state, they could maintain this. And then over time, when we developed paper, when we developed the printing press, we got increasingly sophisticated technologies for writing down and then transferring information. Obviously now we have the digital age, and with all these things came better and better ways to keep track of who owns assets. And one thing I argue in the book is that the invention of the telegraph, which ushered in the telecommunication era, really kind of broke that old commodity trend because up until then, the harder and harder commodities kept winning till you got the gold. Meaning that basically the commodity with the highest stock to flow ratio, which is different than the stock to flow price model, it's a ratio of how much of that commodity exists compared to how much can be made more in a year. But with the invention of the telegraph, we could now exchange information globally very quickly. By exchanging information, you can exchange transactions, which is a fairly low bandwidth thing to do, but we couldn't settle physical gold that quickly. You have to transport it, verify it, which can be hard to do. And so that actually introduced speed as a new variable, which was not a key variable before. And that's a key reason why these centralized fiat currency ledgers have been able to overtake gold in the modern era, because even though they're a step down from gold in terms of scarcity, they solve a lot of problems that gold was not solving in that telegraph era. So gold has not been strong enough to kind of assert itself, and nation states have been more powerful at defining their ledger and kind of even in an international sense. The United States, for example, there's 160 different fiat currencies in the world. They all have little to no acceptance outside of their own country, kind of a monopoly status in their own country. And then the global reserve currency, either the British pound or now the US dollar, serves as like the global ledger that ties them together, because otherwise you'd ironically have barter on an international scale. Imagine if you had Thai currency and Canadian currency and Indonesian currency and Japanese currency, and they were all trying to trade with each other. People would end up with this assortment of different monies and try to figure out who wants it and who doesn't want it. And you're worried about this one devaluing too quickly, whereas this one seems kind of strong. Instead, money tends to have a network effect of liquidity and acceptance. And so that gravitates towards whatever currency is big and relatively stable, has economic scale, military scale, kind of global recognition, which is the world reserve currency that kind of serves as the super commodity among currencies that serves as the one side of either all transactions or most transactions to help make global trade more efficient. This is so fascinating, Lynn. By the way, I just think that I can nerd out on money all day, like for the rest of my life, and I probably will. That's part of what the crypto journey really is. But we've uncovered a few, I think, principles for money, and this will be helpful in understanding how it will be shaped in moving forward into the future as well. And the one is it's an emergent phenomenon. So there have been ideas of, you know, why don't we just abolish money? Why can't we construct a society without money? And I think the answer to that question, you'd probably agree with this, Lynn, is as soon as we try to do that, boom, somebody comes up with a new form of money, right? So there's no money in prison except what do they use? Cigarettes to trade back and forth. And so, boom, emergent phenomenon. You can't have an absence of money. Something will always take its place. So we've got this emergent phenomenon. We've got this power law winning type mechanism because saleability, another word for saleability is liquidity. That's a huge power law winning network effect type game. But then there's the notion that you and David were just talking about where, well, societies can improve their money technology over time and they improve it in two ways, both on the medium, the kind of the unit technology, like can we make it, can we find a harder money, a more sound money, more scarce money, for instance. And then on the ledger technology itself. And one key component there is transaction speed. And so we have this Darwinistic natural selection game happening at the community level and the society level. So I can imagine that now will take us back again to ancient history. So I can imagine within one society, you know, apples aren't as good as shells. And so within that society, shells become the dominant form of money inside of that society. But then we have this world where multiple societies are meeting other societies. And so we have kind of these independent cloisters that don't really interact, but the world is getting smaller. And what happens, I guess, what's the history of society monetary fights? So if I'm a society that's using shells and then I come up against a society that is using some more advanced technology, at least on the medium side, what happens to my money in that type of an arrangement? And do you have any historical examples here? Yeah, so generally what happens is that the society with less technology finds their money diluted. It's obviously not surprising that in the history of cultures meeting each other, ones with lesser technology tend to have a bad time. Not just money, but multiple warfare, all sorts of things, various types of exploitation, colonization, that sort of stuff. But money is one of the avenues, because if the one side doesn't realize how easy their money is to create by the other side, then they can get tricked into trading very valuable resources for something that the other side can make easy. And so, for example, when people came to North America and found that they were using shells, as they perceive shells as valuable, they could use metal tools and other things to make a lot more shells and be able to purchase things. When people went to the Isle of Yap and saw that they were using these special limestone rings, these stone circles as money, which for them were very hard to make, because they had to go to another island to get the limestone and bring it back, it was a very challenging thing to do. And with modern technology, we could just make way more and devalue them. When Europeans went to West Africa and saw that they liked beads as money, in particular, they would have a lot of trade routes. And glass was not hard for Europeans to make, but it was hard for West Africans to make. And so, when that was realized, that was used as a way to exploit them. And so, in general, we can imagine a world without money, and it's a world filled with frictions, where simple things become a lot harder. And that's why humans are problem solvers. Whenever they encounter frictions, they want to figure out how to reduce those frictions. And so, like you said, even in prison or war camps, things like cigarettes will develop as money, because it's an emergent phenomenon.
The Breakdown
A highlight from Crypto Winter Is Over (Says Morgan Stanley)
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, October 22nd, and that means it's time for Long Read Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us in the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, happy weekend. It has not been, I will say, the beautiful, pleasant October that we had all requested here in the Bitcoin and crypto space. No, instead we have dealt constantly with s***head Sam and his stupid trial, along with a seeming unending set of accusations that somehow the incredible horror and tragedy that has played out in Israel is the fault of the crypto industry. And given all that, I thought it would be nice to maybe switch gears just a little bit for today's Long Read Sunday and read a more positive slanting piece, this time from none other than Morgan Stanley. This piece was published by their wealth management group and was called Will Crypto Spring Ever Come? So what we're going to do is read this, it's not too long, and then we'll talk about what I personally think about the issues that it brings up. The piece begins, while cryptocurrency used to make headlines for its radical performance, these days it's often in the news because of lost fortunes, exchange bankruptcies, and business fraud. As investors monitor the crypto market, now is a good time to search for insights from past cryptocurrency trading cycles to understand what may lie ahead. Section. How halving affects crypto supply Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency, accounting for about 50 % of total digital assets by market capitalization, and in many ways acts as a proxy for the overall crypto market. One unique aspect of Bitcoin is that it is designed to go through a process called halving that creates scarcity, so that Bitcoins can maintain their value. Specifically every four years, the number of Bitcoins created every 10 minutes is cut in half. Eventually, when there are 21 million Bitcoins in existence, no more Bitcoins will be mined. By intentionally limiting the supply of new Bitcoin, the shortage caused by the halving can affect the price of Bitcoin to potentially spur a bull run. There have been three such runs on Bitcoin since its inception in 2011, each lasting 12 to 18 months after the halving. Section Four phases of cryptocurrency prices The four -year cryptocurrency cycle roughly corresponds to the four seasons of the year. Summer Historically, most of Bitcoin's gains come directly after the halving. This bull run period starts with the halving event and ends once the price of Bitcoin hits its prior peak. Fall Once the price surpasses the old high, it tends to attract interest from the media, new investors, and businesses, which can then drive prices even higher. This period represents the time between when Bitcoin passes the old high and reaches a new one, which signals that the bull market has run its course. Winter In previous cycles, the bear market decline has come when investors decide to lock in their gains and sell Bitcoin, causing prices to drop while scaring off new investment. This period takes place between the new peak and the next trough. There have been three winters since 2011, lasting about 13 months each. Spring During this period preceding each halving, the price of Bitcoin generally recovers from the cycle's low point, but investor interest tends to be weak. Section Is crypto spring here? Just as a farmer avoids planting seedlings in the winter or too late in the spring, crypto investors want to know when crypto spring has arrived to maximize their investment growing season. Here's what to consider when trying to determine whether crypto spring is truly here or if the market is still in the midst of crypto winter. Time since the last peak The trough of Bitcoin in previous crypto winters has historically occurred 12 to 14 months after the peak. Magnitude of Bitcoin drawdown Previous troughs were about 83 % off their respective highs. Minor capitulation When Bitcoin has neared the trough of past cycles, many Bitcoin miners shut down their operations because they were losing money. When a miner shuts down, it makes it a little easier for the remaining miners. A statistic called Bitcoin difficulty measures how easy or hard it is to mine Bitcoin. When difficulty decreases, it's a sign the trough may be near. Bitcoin price to thermocap multiple Thermocap measures how much money has been invested in Bitcoin since its inception. A lower Bitcoin price to thermocap multiple indicates a trough, while a higher multiple indicates a peak. Exchange problems When the price of crypto drops, it tends to impact the viability of some crypto exchanges. Bankruptcies, bad news, or new regulations may all indicate a trough. Price action A 50 % increase in price from Bitcoin's low is typically a good sign that the trough has been achieved, although there have been examples of such a gain being followed by significant declines. Estimates of when exactly the next halving will occur vary, but history indicates it has the potential to occur sometime around April 2024. Based on current data, signs indicate that crypto winter may be in the past, and that crypto spring is likely on the horizon. However, keep in mind that there have been only three crypto springs to date. In other words, there is still a lot to learn. One key thing to keep in mind? As with any investment, past performance doesn't indicate future results. Potential risks such as encryption breaking, software bugs, recession, or coordinated government action could emerge before the expected halving and disrupt the cycle. While no one can tell you if now is the right time to buy or sell cryptocurrency, today is the right time to learn more about the crypto market's cyclical tendencies so that you can ask questions, monitor trends, and determine for yourself if the cycle will repeat a fourth time and whether to invest.
Crypto Critics' Corner
A highlight from Mooonstone Bank: FTX, Deltec, and the Mission to Move Millions
"Welcome back everyone, I am Cass Pianci and I'm joined as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you, Cass? Good. Annoyed. It's been a dumb week for everyone in the world, basically. There's just so many stupid stories going on right now. But we're focused on Moonstone Bank today, which in a sense is related to the ongoing drama of FTX and Alameda Research, where we've been doing some coverage in regard to the trial as well. But yeah, Moonstone Bank is a particular and very niche topic, but it deserves kind of an examination of its own. I guess I just want to get us started with the very basic facts of what Moonstone was. So Farmington Bank was established in the 1800s. This was a small community bank located in eastern Washington state. It basically served farmers that were locally in this very, very small town of Farmington. Farmington has, I think even right now, something like 250, 300 people or something like that. Incredibly tiny little town. Farmington got bought by a Hong Kong citizen who was naturalized English, I believe. So he was an English citizen of Hong Kong. He purchased the bank in the 1990s and held onto it for 20 -ish years, and then he sold it. And the gentleman that he sold it to is Jean Chalapin, who is an incredibly wealthy banker, but also the creator of the famous cartoon Inspector Gadget and a handful of other cartoons. He is the owner of a large bank in the Bahamas known as Deltech, Deltech Bank and Trust. Deltech served as the main bank for Tether and also served FTX and Alameda Research. They served a lot of cryptocurrency companies. And he purchased Farmington State Bank in 2020. But do you want to take it from there, Bennett? Jean Chalapin went out and purchased this bank, this small bank in the United States. And this is something that Deltech executives have discussed doing before in their publications and stuff about how going to acquire this type of bank effectively gets you the banking license without some of the other headaches. Later, in 2021, Alameda Research agreed to invest $11 .5 million into Moonstone Bank, owning 9 .9 % of it and valuing the bank at $115 million. Besides this investment into Moonstone Bank by Alameda Research, $50 million of the deposits at Moonstone, which was basically all of the deposits at Moonstone, came from FTX funds. Besides that $50 million, there was an additional $50 million loan from FTX to Deltech around the same time that Alameda Research made this $11 .5 million investment. So the reason Moonstone is so important is because there was this attempt by the chairman of the Bank of Cryptocurrency in the Bahamas and the CEO of this important trading firm in exchange, Sam Bankman -Fried, to go out and attempt to gain control of this small community bank, fill it with cryptocurrency funds. And then the stated plan from like Han Vier, the chief marketing officer of the firm, was to try to push this to be like the future of online banking. Serve cryptocurrency, serve cannabis, and create a new experience of online banking that people outside of the small community of Farmington could access. And so that's how we go from like this very small bank to suddenly being a much larger bank with ties to criminal behavior. So what they did is once they had purchased this bank, once Jean Chalapin had bought Moonstone, almost immediately he made the move to transfer the regulatory oversight of Farmington to the Federal Reserve. So initially, smaller banks like this, state chartered banks, banks that aren't doing a lot of global transactions and bigger transactions, generally they prefer the regulatory purview of the federal depositors insurance corporation, the FDIC, just because I think that the regulatory guidelines for the FDIC are a little looser. I don't know if that's the right, I don't want to make the suggestion that the FDIC is not monitoring things and not doing a great job of regulating. That's not my point, but that this smaller bank and smaller banks in general choose the regulatory purview of the FDIC. He moved to have the bank regulated by the Federal Reserve. The one promise made during this regulatory transfer was that Farmington would not be altering its business massively, that it especially wouldn't be altering its business massively in the sense of taking on things like cryptocurrency or cannabis. They almost immediately went against this promise. They almost instantly changed their name from Farmington to doing business as Moonstone, as in to the moon, cryptocurrency, and stone, like stoned marijuana. So they're taking on these two businesses that federally are struggling and having a lot of issues and aren't being accepted widely by the banking system in America, and they're diving headfirst into it. What was surprising for me and many other individuals who covered this and watched as it unfolded was that the Federal Reserve didn't do anything to stop this. And I think part of this is that as the new regulator took over and started monitoring it, there was this six -month, year -long period of this transition from the FDIC regulating them to the Federal Reserve regulating them. And during that time, they could do nearly whatever they wanted. And so I think you're kind of getting at exactly what the point of this move is by switching from FDIC to the Federal Reserve. They started their path towards eventually getting like a Federal Reserve master account and access to like the Federal Reserve's interbank settlement systems and things like that. And they were able to take advantage of kind of the initial scrutiny when they made their like request to become Federal Reserve regulated. And as you kind of pointed towards, there was looser oversight for the period immediately after that, where they were then able to take on this investment from Alameda Research, bring in the new executive team and relaunch with this change business model. And I guess they hoped that by the time the Federal Reserve came back to check on them, the business model would be doing good and they could beg for forgiveness instead of asking for permission. As they decide to get involved with cryptocurrency banking and cannabis banking, I honestly have no idea how much they helped bank the cannabis business in Washington. I think it was a goal more than like a thing they actually did based on like the amount of deposits and what percent we know were FTX. Right. And so like that brings us to the point of very shortly thereafter, this purchase and this switch of regulatory regime, we have this investment by Alameda Research worth $11 .5 million dollars in valuing the bank, which again, guys, this is an incredibly small bank with very few depositors and not a lot of money. Total assets, just to be clear, before Alameda made their investment, was like $5 million. Alameda like invested double their total assets at the time in exchange for less than 10 percent. I think it was less than 10 percent, too, so they could avoid certain reporting obligations if they owned more than 10 percent of the bank. That's right. For people who aren't familiar with this way, it's not just a banking thing. Any publicly traded company, for instance, the famous example of this is Elon Musk purchasing roughly nine point nine percent of Twitter so that he could become a shareholder, but didn't have to do any specific things to get that that board chair seat or whatever. Ultimately, he ended up buying Twitter, so it didn't matter. But similar things happen in business all the time. I think what's interesting here is that, like you said, it valued a very tiny bank, one of the top like five smallest banks in America. It valued it at one hundred and fifteen million dollars, which is I don't know, it's unheard of. But we know how Alameda Research and FTX were doing their investing, which was to dump money everywhere to whoever wanted it. I don't think that's what this is. This is you're right. This is not anywhere to whoever wanted it. This is more like Hyvex than Anthropic, for example. You're right. You're one hundred percent agree with you. But let me put it this way. This was obviously overvalued. Why was this obviously overvalued? Well, there's where we. Conspiracy or stupidity. Right. There's where we get into the interesting part. Because for some of this stuff, like we like we've seen in the trial, you mentioned Anthropic, where they gave them half a billion dollars because they had an idea, which is incredible. I would love half a billion dollars for an idea. Well, have at least one idea first. Well, OK. I mean, that's where I'm screwed.
Six Minutes
A highlight from Introducing: Mina & Lucys Guide to Slaying Dracula
"Hey, listeners! If you love the show you're listening to right now, then you have to check out our new series, Mina and Lucy's Guide to Slaying Dracula, based loosely on the classic novel by Bram Stoker. It's funny and exciting and maybe just a little bit creepy -crawly. I'm going to play the first episode for you now, so have a listen and then make sure to search for and follow Mina and Lucy's Guide to Slaying Dracula wherever you listen to this show. If you dare... T 'was the night before Halloween, when all through the haunted house, creatures were stirring, especially a zombie mouse. More blood, Mina? Always, Lucy. Not bad. An excellent 2008 vintage. Yes, a good year. You were right. Adding maple syrup to the fruit punch... I mean, to the blood, definitely makes it thicker. Pairs nicely with the chocolate peanut butter spiders, too. This might be our best graveyard picnic yet, Luce. My favorite pre -Halloween tradition of ours. And tomorrow, we get to show everyone our most gruesome costumes yet. Undead bridezilla. And zombies earlier. Did it just get a lot colder and foggier? Hello, girls. Grandpa, it's you. Hello, Dr. Van Helsing. Did you just get the hearse wash? I did, Lucy. Thank you for noticing. I was being sarcastic. It's covered in mud. Drats. That's what I get for taking the scenic route. How was the graveyard picnic? Great, Grandpa, but we need to get home to finish our costumes. That was the whole point of the sleepover. Hop in. I'll have you home in a jiffy. Ow! Why do you have wooden stakes back here? Oh, you know, for the garden. Now, tell me about these terrifying costumes. Grandpa, what is it? Mina, were you girls alone in the graveyard? I mean, it's 9 36 p .m. Who else would be here other than the dead? Good one, Mina. Right. Right, of course. Are you gonna drive, Dr. Van Helsing? Yes, yes. Off we go into the fog. And once I get you home, it's lights out. Still a school night. I'm way too jazzed to go to bed. Our picnic was 90 % shorter. Yeah, there's no chance I'm gonna fall asleep tonight. Why is the window open? Luce, did you open this? Lucy? Oh no, she's gone. Pick up, pick up. Dang it, she left her phone. Reporter's recorder, entry number 562, Mina's Musings. It's 2 a .m. and... Oh, that means it's Halloween. I'm on the hunt for my best friend, Lucy West. Lucy, Lucy! So far, no trace of her. I tried to put myself in her shoes, but I don't think she's wearing any. Lucy, Lucy! Typically, when she sleepwalks, she doesn't go very far. But I've already biked past school and Lucy's house. No luck. Lucy! I'm heading to the graveyard next, so I can get a good view of the entire town. We'll report back. Reporter's recorder, entry number 562, part 2, Mina's Musings. I made it back to the graveyard, but it's nearly impossible to see anything because a thick fog has taken over Whitby. I've never seen anything like it. But to be fair, I'm never usually awake at this hour. Back to the task at hand. Where is Lucy West? I'm standing on her favorite bench, trying to see if I can spot her. So far, I only see fog. And more fog. Lucy! She's on the beach! And before I sign off, let the record reflect that I was correct. She is not wearing any shoes. She's coming. Lucy? She's coming. The Demeter. Time to wake up. She's coming. Where? What's going on? It's freezing, Luce. Here, take my jacket. Mina, why are we on the beach? It's so foggy. You were sleepwalking again. Ugh, my mom's not gonna be happy. She'll understand. It's the fourth time this month. How did I get all the way to the shore? Usually we find you in the kitchen or in the dog bed. It's getting worse. It'll be okay. How do you know? Did you sleepwalk like this too? You mean after my parents died? Yeah. No, but that was mostly because I couldn't sleep at all. It doesn't get any easier, does it? Losing your dad is still fresh, Luce. It's not that it gets easier, but it changes. How? I mean, I lost my parents on Halloween. And at first, I thought that would ruin it. But in some ways, Halloween is even more special now. Remembering and celebrating them on a holiday that we loved as a family. One that honors and respects death. Mina, it's hard. But I try to remember that they never really are. Mina, do you hear those whispers? I think they're coming from the ocean. I'm trying to be sincere here. We always carry them with us. Mina, it's getting louder. Look out! Tell me that's not an old -timey ship that almost ran us over. It's not an old -timey ship that almost ran us over. Actually, it is. And it's definitely haunted. GCM Shows presents Mina and Luce's Guide to Slaying Dracula. Based loosely on the classic novel by Bram Stoker. Chapter One. The Night Before Halloween. The Demeter? Do you think anyone is on board the ship? Uh, that's not a ship, Mina. That's a shipwreck. We need to check it out. I just woke up on the beach, Mina. I'm not trying to get on a haunted ship. You love haunted stuff. And you're always telling me gnarly injury stories. I also love REM sleep. You'll sleep when you're dead. Hey, there's a ladder next to the plank. Help me reach it. You're taller. Fine. One, two, three. I got it. I made it. Here, I'll drop the ladder down for you. No, thanks. I'm good. What happened to your sense of adventure, Luce? It's back at your house. Warm in bed, waiting for me to return. Oh, come on. Mina, when are you going to give this up? How's never o 'clock. You owe me. Here, grab my hand. Wow, Yes. it's like a pirate ship. Where are the pirates? No captain, no crew. Where did it come from? Reporter's recorder, entry number 562, part three. Mina's musings. Hey, Luce, do you have your night photography camera? She didn't think to bring it with me while I was sleepwalking. Okay, okay. Luce and I just witnessed a ghostly shipwreck of epic proportions on the Whitby shoreline. It's no Titanic, but it's still pretty big. We're walking along the ship's top deck to check for survivors, but there isn't a soul in sight. Hey, maybe these stairs lead below deck. I guarantee there's some creepiness down there. That's the spirit. Literally. Reporters update, the stairs led us to the hull of the ship, which is hardly intact, and is also boring and empty. Let's go. What happened? I tripped over a velvet bag. Huh, that's a full -blown satchel right there. Where is that growl coming from? Um, maybe from the beast with the red glowing eyes? It's a giant wolf. Mina, look out! Go, go, go! Whoa, are you okay? That wolf tried to take off your hand. I'm fine. I think it just wanted this satchel. Go, shut the door! Let's get out of here! Hurry, come on! We gotta go! Let's go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go! I think it's gone. Gone where? I don't know, but I don't hear - What's in my hair? What is that? It's a bat. A bat came through the porthole. Get it out, get it out! Don't panic. There's a bat in my hair. I think I'm allowed to panic a little. Get it out! Okay, okay, it's out. Let's get out of here. Okay, come on, come on. Off the boat, let's go, come on. Did you manage to sleep at all last night, Lucy? Does sleepwalking count? So, are we gonna tell Jonathan about the ship and the, you know, wolf and bat? I'm sure you are. Mina, Lucy, good morning. Your zombie costumes turned out wonderfully. Nice work. We aren't wearing our costumes yet, Mr. Harker. Oh. Uh, Jonathan, time for school. Your perfectly normally dressed friends are here. Thanks, Dad. Bye, Dad. Okay, what's up with you two? You look paler than usual. I, for one, think we look excellent, considering we dodged two wild animals last night on an ancient haunted ship. Okay, one, ghosts aren't real, and two, a ship hasn't docked in Whitby in decades. It's too rocky and dangerous. I wouldn't say it docked, more like a violent crashing on the beach. Sure, and you met Jack Sparrow and Captain Hook on board. They were just dying to visit Whitby, weren't they? I wish I'd gotten some pictures because he's not going to believe it till he sees it. So let's show him. No way, we can't be late for school. It'll take two minutes. Prepare to be amazed and horrified. Uh, am I missing something? Mina, where'd the ship go? I, I don't know. It's not here. Do you think it got swept back out to sea? You saw it. It was way too wrecked for that. Okay, weird prank. Let's go. This is not a prank. We are way more skilled pranksters than this. So I guess this alleged ancient ship grew wings and flew off. Yes, that is my exact hypothesis, Jonathan. Lucy, how does a shipwreck just disappear? Jonathan, I know you make questionable fashion choices, but why is there a big ugly hat over there on your desk? There is a human boy under that hat. Who is it? I don't know, but he's in my seat. Uh, hey, I'm Jonathan. Uh, hello? I think he's asleep. I wish I was asleep. Is he even breathing? Luce, check his pulse. Why me? Your mom's a nurse. Yeah, my mom is. I'm not. Fine, I'll do it. Hello? Hello? Hello? Wow, his skin is freezing. Good morning, class. Why is it so dark in here? Time to let the light in. He's alive. And hissing? Hey, easy dude. Oh, uh, sorry about that. Class, we have a new student with us today. New student? Please give a warm Whitby Middle School welcome to... Oh, didn't anyone tell you Halloween costumes aren't allowed until after school? What costume? Isn't that a farmer costume? The big straw hat? It needs to go, I'm afraid. School policy. You will let me wear my hat at all times and not give me any more grief about it. Uh, because I have a sensitivity to UV light. I will not give you any more grief about wearing your hat even though it is against school policy. Great. Glad we straightened that out. Hi everybody, my name is Vladimir. You can call me... Vlad. Vlad? Vlad? Vlad? If you can't wait to find out what happens next in Mina and Lucy's Guide to Slaying Dracula, then make sure to search for the show wherever you're listening to this and follow it to make sure you get every episode. Or look for the link to our website in the show notes. Thank you. Hi, I'm Suri Morero. And I'm Jenna Ducanet. And we play Mina and Lucy in Mina and Lucy's Guide to Slaying Dracula. For more great shows, visit gzmshows .com. That was a good one. Nice job. Shh, it's starting. GZM shows. Imagination amplified.
Crypto Altruism Podcast
A highlight from The Web3 Nonprofit Episode 5 - DirectEd Development Foundation
"Blockchain is extremely radical, perhaps too much so in some people's view in terms of transparency, because you can see all the funds. Now, if you dare to put yourself out there on a blockchain and manage your financials there, then that's something that can build trust. Because there is now a big problem of increasing mistrust to institutions. And this is a trend that you can stop, I believe, using various technologies that enable donors to independently verify what their funds are being used for. Welcome to the fifth episode of the Web3 Nonprofit. In each episode, we will be highlighting a different nonprofit organization that is innovating with Web3 technology. Now, before we dive in and welcome our guests, I want to give a special shoutout and thanks to Endowment for their partnership in helping bring this to life. So, I wanted to share a special message from their team. Hi, it's Day and I've got something really exciting from Endowment to tell you about this week. We've been doing all this talking lately about how great it is giving digital assets on chain, right? It's so much more transparent and efficient and affordable. And lately we've been thinking that maybe it shouldn't just be for people with crypto or NFTs and wallets. That's why this giving season, Endowment is for everyone. We're opening our doors to every financial background and making it really easy for anyone to get upgraded to on -chain giving. You can log in with your Google, Facebook or Discord. There's no wallet needed and start opening a donor advise fund for free with no minimum donation. You can donate stock from your preferred broker or cash from your credit card or your bank account. We've got Apple Pay, Google Pay, Cash App, like whatever you got. Your house, maybe, maybe not your house, but pretty much anything else. We're here to help you turn it into impact and we hope you'll give it a try. Go to app .endowment .org, click the orange start a fund button and let us know what you think. We're at endowment .org, E -N -D -A -O -M -E -N -T. Definitely head over to endowment .org, that's E -N -D -A -O -M -E -N -T .org to learn about their work. Okay, now the moment we've all been waiting for. For the fifth episode, we're excited to highlight the work of Directed Development Foundation, a nonprofit delivering evidence -based, highly scalable and cost -effective training in coding and entrepreneurship to high potential students right after secondary school around the world, starting in Kenya and Ethiopia. Today we welcome to the podcast Simon Sullstrom, CEO at Directed Development. So let's dive right in. Okay, Simon, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to have you on our new podcast series, the Web3 Nonprofit. I'm so excited to learn about the great work you're doing, so thanks for being here. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, I know, of course, of course. Really excited that I had the opportunity to connect with your organization. You're doing some really fascinating work to use next generation technology like blockchain to change how you're delivering your educational programs, your scholarships. So really excited to dive into that. Before you get there, though, I'd love to hear your story and how you got into this world. So give me your background. How did you end up working in the nonprofit sector? I think that there's a longer story and there's a slightly shorter story, but I would point that my personal experiences starting when I was 15, actually, when I had the opportunity to study abroad in China for a year. That was for me as someone who grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, in a very normal middle -class family. It was a bit of a wake -up call in the sense that I saw for the first time how tough life was in people in the lower -income countries. It was extremely competitive. They had to fight with every… I mean, every waking hour almost was about studying and succeeding and getting opportunities. But more importantly, during that exchange year, I met someone who went to Harvard Law himself. He had then worked as a public defender for 20 years or so in San Diego. He had started a nonprofit that helped at -risk youth see that there's more in life for them. That particular year, he just happened to have gone to my high school exchange, a high school in Shanghai, and he brought these kids. I interacted with them. I was very much inspired by what he did. His name is Daniel Ibarra. Ever since then, I also helped him out with the charity, his charity. I invited them to come to Stockholm. I think that was the seed of why I chose to launch Directed as a nonprofit. There were many other people. I met other people, and I was inspired by them. I chose to take this route. Yeah, that's amazing. It's always so incredible the impact that one person can have on your life and your life's path in shaping that, right? I appreciate you sharing that story. That's really cool. Now I'm excited to learn about Directed Development. Give me the rundown. Can you please introduce listeners to the mission of your organization? I'd Yes. like to start with the sort of ethos, which is that we are all here to build a world in which any person can realize their full potential. This is rooted in this deep sense of injustice that I feel like a lot of people might have, because as a kid, you do not really choose where you're born. You don't really choose the circumstances you're given. So that's really the core ethos that brings all of us together. But what do we actually do? Well, we provide scholarships and coding boot camps to high potential students in, first and foremost, Africa, but then maybe in the future, other parts of the world. And these coding boot camps not only cover programming, JavaScript, but also soft skills and entrepreneurship. They are given in a three -part process. So it starts with the introductory coding course that is mobile phone -based so that we can actually reach any student. Because even in Kenya and even in Ethiopia, people have smartphones. So we're talking about the farmers who live off of $2 per day. Maybe they won't have the best. They might have one that's shared across like five, six family members, but they have still that one phone. So we want to make sure that we can capture all of them. If they do well in this one -week course, they're then invited to take part in a three -month -long, very intensive coding boot camp. Now, that is covering specifically web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then the MERN framework, which is one of the most popular web development frameworks at the moment. So after having gone through these two courses, they are then offered, well, obviously not all, but the ones who do very well are offered paid internships with Western tech companies that we partner with. And that is six months long. And then beyond that, we are hoping that they actually are able to successfully gain employment as remote software engineers. for these Western tech companies. But that's not really the end of the story because our goal really is to give the students the skills to bring back to their own country, to their local communities, to build applications that solve real -world problems. So that's why we also have this entrepreneurship element. They are building already for their final project. Some of them are building amazing local projects. For example, there's one student who built essentially a community governance app where citizens can see what policy decisions are coming up in my local government. What do I think about that? So the policymakers can see that. And what do they vote on at the end? Well, somewhat simple, but it's extremely useful, not just in Kenya, but anywhere in the world. So this is the core program. Now, there's also a blockchain element to it, and not just one way. The first sort of idea that we actually started with was that of scholarship on -chain. Now, that's where the name comes from, actually. DirectEd stems from Direct Donations for Education. So that's why we started with DirectEd. Now, the boot camp and everything that I've said so far was actually not part of the initial project that we started with. What we started with was simply facilitating scholarships on -chain. But as entrepreneurs, we went, we talked to people. We realized that university education is not necessarily the most efficient use of this scholarship money. A lot of students, unfortunately, go through three years of education, and they come out to the job market and realize that none of this was relevant for me getting a job. And so there's a huge mismatch in what the university students, graduates expect in Africa and many other parts of the world as well, and what employers expect. And unlike in certain Western countries, where the companies can afford to upskill, that's not the case. And what often just happens is that the firms just don't hire them. They don't have the margins to upskill on -the -job training. So there's huge unemployment, even among university graduates. So we thought that why not look at, I mean, the clear demand there is, both in the West but also locally for IT skills, and the abundance of free, open -source course, like extremely high -quality material online. Why not just, you know, match these two obvious problems and provide the students with that little, you know, the things that are missing, which is like a laptop, they need Wi -Fi, they need a little bit of discipline and accountability. But that's about it. So, for example, in the intro course that I mentioned before, we took about 70 % from Harvard's CS50 Python course. We adapted it to a mobile -only environment, and so we have an Android -based Python compiler. So it's actually mimicking the real development environment. It's not like an app, and they learn using that. So that is the scholarship component. We also realized that you can't just give scholarships, like, you know, give some money to folks and then hope for the best, but there is a need for accountability as well. So that's why we are doing this as milestone -based scholarships, which means that we give the students a bit of cash so they can buy some mobile data, have transport, get to where they need to. But then, in order to proceed in the coding bootcamp and continue to receive mobile data bundles, they will need to pass the sort of exams that we have. So we get this milestone -based distribution. There is one last aspect, and we can talk about this a little bit later, but we also use blockchain tokens to essentially distribute tutor vouchers. So we're creating a token. We call it a tutorial voucher. And that's simply a way for us to manage this otherwise very cumbersome bureaucracy or management of, well, you know, how do you create a voucher? Like, on a blockchain, it's super simple. You just create a token. So I hope that gives you a good introduction and overview. Yeah, definitely. That's amazing. I mean, first of all, incredible mission. And I love the structure of it, right, where it just keeps kind of giving more and more opportunity to these individuals and giving them an internship, giving them the tools to then implement change in their local communities I think is so powerful. So kudos to you for doing that. You know, incredible, incredible work. You know, and so let's dive a bit into the blockchain elements that you kind of touched on a little bit there. So there's a quote in your light paper I like to share, and it says, by pioneering the use of blockchain technology and decentralized identifiers to facilitate stipends, we enable meaningful transparency, full traceability and accountability at scale. So I'm very interested to start with the decentralized identifiers and the creation of these verified on -chain credentials. So tell me a little bit about that in the most basic, explain it like in five terms you can for those listening and that maybe aren't as familiar with the tech behind blockchain. Yes. So the first thing I will try to make it very, very clear is that decentralized identifiers is a term that is used inside blockchain, but it is also a term that is used within a different tech stack. And that's called self -sovereign identity. It's also known as self -sovereign identity. And this is not a blockchain technology. It does not require blockchain. It is very popular within blockchain, but it is not. And it is qualitatively different. Okay. And I'll try to explain how now. So this is a newly established W3C standard as of last year. And to use an analogy to explain how this decentralized identifiers or self -sovereign identifiers work, I imagine that you have a card and it's like sort of an identity card, but it's empty. Now you have this locally, you hold it yourself, and then you go to various issuers of credentials. That could be the local government. It could be the university that you attended. It could be a local health clinician. And what they would then do is they have their unique signature, private signature in a very similar way to blockchain. And they sign a document, a so -called verifiable credential, which you can think of as being added to your little card. So as you go along, you have the same card and you get all of these like little stamps. Now, the thing that makes it very different from blockchain is that this is local. It is not on a blockchain. It is you hold it yourself and anyone can check the authenticity by checking the signature against the public key or the public sort of identifier. But it's not viewable by anyone. And if I want to show, for example, that I'm a Swedish citizen, I could selectively disclose exactly what information I want to reveal to the other party. If you imagine a blockchain, if I send you something through my wallet, you can see all assets that I have and all my transaction history that I've ever gone through. So self -sovereign identity or decentralized identifiers, they're first of all privacy -preserving. So no one can see which credentials I've showed to anyone else. And they're also local. They're owned by me, myself.
Woz Happening!!!!
A highlight from Suspiria (2018) (Horror/Supernatural) Movie Review
"What's happening everybody, Kira and Ben back again. So last week we kind of kicked off Spooky Season with Cannibal Holocaust and this time we're going into a different type of horror. Today we're going to be talking about 2018 Suspiria. Ben, we were talking a little bit off screen, off camera about this, but tell me your history with the movie. So I had never heard of it. You had suggested it and I was like alright cool because you get some great suggestions and then I turned it on and I saw the lady from the Doctor Strange movies, the very first Sorcerer Supreme, so I was all excited because I think she's great and that's where it stuck off. Awesome, yeah. So obviously this is a huge favorite of mine and we will talk about our opinions later because I want to hear everything that you have to say, but I was first introduced to this because movie I was such a fan of the original, the 1978 one by Dario Argento and then of course when I heard that they were doing a remake I was obviously hesitant, but I do like the remake. I do think it is really good in certain aspects. I think Luca Guadagnino, I'm so sorry again you guys, my pronunciations are bad, I think he did a really good job paying homage to the original while keeping his fresh and exciting and who doesn't love some witches? Right, covens, covens and I grew up in Lynn's Salem area so I actually got to see and hang out with some witches in my lifetime so I thought that was pretty cool. You know of course I have my own thing about witches, they're not always evil like people portray so like you know, you know, harm me none, you know, I've been around them where I know that they don't actually want to harm anybody, they just want to do good and study nature so, but you know, there's also the bad aspect of everything and you know, the good and bad so I thought it was pretty cool. Absolutely and what I like about these witches is they kind of just harm their own, like obviously there's like that one scene when they're like playing with the police officers and things like that, but I like these kinds of witches, these kind of sort of lurking, wanting power witches, I don't know if there's another word that I'm thinking of to grab that. I totally got it, I thought the fact that, you know, if you listen to what they say, they were there during the, you know, during the war and they were like, they were the only source of escape for women at that, you know, for that time period and I mean of course it's fictional but you know, really if you think about it during World War II there was no escape for women, I mean there was a manpower organization like the SS and all them and if you were a woman at that time period, well you were screwed. Absolutely and what I like about this movie, similar to, what was the movie we just did, oh, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, there is such an absence of men in the film that I think is really refreshing, even the male, the psychiatrist that we see who counsels some of the girls is actually also played by Tilda Swinton, so she plays two roles in the film. Oh really? Yeah, so that's her in drag. Oh that was awesome. Isn't that awesome? This is an amazing job because I did not realize that. She looks so good, the makeup in this movie is so good and there's a scene that we're gonna talk about later because you know me, I'm all about practical effects versus CGI and if you guys know the scene I'm referencing, you know it's brutal and you also know there is no CGI involved, so I think that is very, very cool. So let's dive into the story for those who aren't familiar. So we are our main protagonist, Susie Bannon, she is traveling all the way from America, I like assume in my head it's Oklahoma, I don't know if it is, she's on a farm, what did you get or if I'm misremembering? I think she came from the farm but then she went to New York because she said she watched the lady do the play in New York. Right but she said she had to take a bus to New York. Oh did she? Oh yeah. Maybe Philadelphia, I don't know you guys. I don't know, she said she saw it three times though, so I mean. Maybe Philadelphia. She's on a farm. Yes, yeah, she's a farmer. She's on a farm and she goes to New York to see this play because this is, because she is applying to go to the dance academy in Berlin and so she is obviously a huge fan of the work, she memorizes the dance from VOC, which is what they end up performing and she's so excited to come in, she feels like she's being drawn to this place, this is a phrase that she uses over and over again, is that something was pulling her to this dance academy and she goes and obviously she only starts waves because she is so good and the teachers, aka the witches, can see that in her and while this is happening, one of the other students has gone missing, we see her first in the beginning is played by Chloe Grace Martinez and we see her go missing and it's kind of like, oh what's happening and you kind of, as we're learning about Susie and we're learning about the dance studio, we kind of see the unravelings and kind of the tensions that are building and as of right now, to our knowledge, everything is set not against a supernatural background. Yeah, yeah. They give hints when she's talking to the psychiatrist but you don't actually know what's going on. Absolutely. She uses phrases like she's in my head, I can feel her, she's trying to control me. It's all very interesting. So then Susie decides that she is going to ask to dance the lead role in the VOC. Now this role, the role of the protagonist is supposed to be incredibly difficult to dance and is an incredibly hard dance. Now Tilda Swinton's character, Mother Marcos, does not believe that she can perform this but she allows her to and while this has happened, the scene right before this I should have said, another girl in the dance studio starts freaking out in rehearsal, starts calling everyone witches, is crying hysterically, is very upset and I think it's Blanc takes her and she says, okay, go outside, we're going to talk and kind of leads her into this sort of secret auditorium and it is actually a secret rehearsal room covered in mirrors. Now Susie has come to the front and she says that she is going to dance the role of the protagonist in VOC and Mother Marcos, Tilda Swinton's character, touches her feet and I love the subtlety of this like motion of her touching her feet and you kind of see that power going in, that sort of like energy transference and that I think is the first main tip off of the witches and from that Susie starts to dance and she starts and stops because she messes up the first time but while she's dancing, it keeps panning to the scene, in the room where the other girl is and as Susie starts dancing, this girl's bone, this girl also starts dancing but in the reverse of what Susie is doing, so it's like everything that Susie is doing is happening to this girl but instead of controlling the motions, her bones are breaking and she gets contorted into this horrifying mess and this is the scene I'm talking about, it is all practical effects. Yeah, it's pretty cool. She gets twisted like a pretzel and you see her agony and every time the girl makes a step or a move or something, she just twists a different way and you just hear the bones cracking and it was really gross. It was really gross but it's also crazy, it's awesome. So while this is happening, obviously it is happening without the knowledge of Susie or we should assume it's happening without the knowledge of Susie and once she is completed, she has to go lie down because she's exhausted and Tilda Swinton seems to be very pleased with what she was doing and the next scene is I love the visual. So one thing I love about this movie is the visuals of it. I think it is so visually stunning, similar to the original which is also visually stunning and I think what is so good about it is Luca Guadalajira does a great job. Even though this movie is so contrasted to the first, it is still within the same veins, I believe. So we have Dario Argento who is very neon, very bright. You have this incredible, vibrant background that all these horrors are happening against and then in Luca's, it is much darker. Everything is much more grey, it's very monotoned and with that, I think it's because it's telling a different story. In the original, you don't have the backdrop. Obviously, it's still set in Germany but they don't focus on the backdrop of the war as much. So this one was introduced as a substory which people during its release debated if it was very relevant to the story but I think like you had said, it talks about giving women an escape and it kind of sets I think the tone of this kind of searching and escapism and trying to leave the situation that you're in. Yeah because if you listen to what the doctor says, his wife got separated from him and she gets trapped and she has to go to the concentration camp and things happen to her. So you can see what a woman by herself had to deal with compared to what a woman in the dance group had to deal with. So they were protected in the dance group whereas the wife wasn't protected and later on, one of the witches comes and says stuff to him that she knows happened and I think for me, it was a way of showing the contrast of is this what happened to her and I think in her mind, she was like had she been with us, none of that would have happened to her. It was really cool. It was. I think it is fine just like you said. It adds more to the story but I can see where the same criticisms were like it is pointless. So after that, now Susie is dancing and they are going to perform the show and they do a fine job. It's a fine show. What happens after is so Susie is befriending Sarah and Sarah is played by the ever lovely Mia Goth. I'm a huge fan of hers. Maybe we can talk about doing X or Pearl. Are you familiar with this? Well we can talk about it but so she befriends Sarah and Sarah can kind of feel what's going on. She kind of understands that there's something lurking that is not seen and the witches start to catch on and they are going to punish her the same way that they punished Patricia I think her name is and Susie and as Susie starts dancing and she sees that Sarah is in agony, she immediately stops and kind of chastises them for being like what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And they kind of take Sarah away and that's the last we see of her for a while. Now throughout all this, I love this coven of older witches because I think their relations are so interesting and I thought this in the first one as well. Obviously you're going to have it from the point of view of your protagonist but I always thought like seeing more of the coven and seeing more of their politics I thought would be so cool especially because it's such a large part of this one and I like I love that one scene at the table when they're all like eating in their quarters and they're talking about who they're going to vote for and I think that was really I thought that was interesting. What are your thoughts? Is that when the woman stabbed herself with the scissors in the throat? No. Or is that later on? That's later on. Okay. No, I thought it was pretty cool because like it so when you're talking to the doctor, the doctor talks about the three patriarchs of this coven because he's told by Patricia about this and he names the three patriarchs. So one of the patriarchs is sick and dying because she's old and she has to transfer herself into a younger body. Right. So all of them have done this except for this one matriarch is that needing of a body. That's why they're doing the dance. I think the lady that plays the Sorcerer Supreme she sees in the girl that they have like the girl that is really good at dancing. She doesn't want to do it to her. She's like I kind of don't want to do this to her. You can see like she's starting to become fond of her. I just thought like the contrasting between the three mothers and like their little inner group battle and the other witches around them. Not the three main but the rest of them like all trying to vie for you know sucking up to the one that they wanted to win basically. Exactly and that's what I thought was so interesting and that's what I was saying because it felt like politics and what you wanted to see and it's so interesting that you said that Marcos became fond of Susie because in my mind it always felt like she was kind of grooming her for something in a way that she could see that Susie was strong enough to handle a Suspirium but was still hesitant and didn't I don't think realize because I think she could also see the pull in her but couldn't recognize what it was because she would always say this one is so strong. Yeah I think when she came into the room mm -hmm and she said you don't have to do this you can leave right now I'll make you forget that's when I realized that she actually gave a crap.
The Café Bitcoin Podcast
A highlight from CPI, SBF Trial, Blockstream Lightning, and Swan Private Macro Friday with Sam Callahan, John Haar, Cory Klippsten, and more! - October 13th, 2023
"Hello, and welcome to the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the best way to buy and learn about Bitcoin. I'm your host, Alex Danson, and we're excited to announce that we're bringing the Cafe Bitcoin Conversations Twitter Spaces to you on this show, the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast, Monday through Friday every week. Join us as we speak to guests like Michael Saylor, Len Alden, Corey Clifston, Greg Foss, Tomer Strohle, and many others in the Bitcoin space. Also, be sure to hit that subscribe button. Make sure you get notifications when we launch a new episode. You can join us live on Twitter Spaces Monday through Friday, starting at 7 a .m. Pacific and 10 a .m. Eastern every morning to become part of the conversation yourself. Thanks again. We look forward to bringing you the best Bitcoin content daily here on the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast. Good morning. Welcome to Cafe Bitcoin. Jacob, that song is such a banger. I love that every morning. Yeah, shout out to Tip and Z for letting us play that. Yeah, Tip crushed it at Pacific Bitcoin. I'm sure you guys talked about that, but that was awesome. What's up, everybody? Michelle, for those who are interested, I just put the lyrics up in the nest. She just put the lyrics online yesterday. Peter, bro, I went to sleep. You were on a space. I wake up. You're on a space. You've been killing it. I went to sleep during that space as well. Peter, stars rising. That's what I was going to say about you, Don. Yeah, I got a few issues, too. It's all good. We're all degenerates. I thought you were on your way to El Salvador. Yeah, quick couple of errands. Need to get a quick surfing. Need to check in real quick here. See what Sam thinks about the big appeal day today. Get some predictions and then hop in and I'm gone. What's the appeal day? Today, if I'm correct, Sam probably knows the details, but it's the deadline at midnight for the SEC to appeal the decision that was reached during Grayscale's Spot ETF appeal. Yeah, that's right. So basically, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled in August that the SEC denying the conversion of GPTC to an ETF was arbitrary and capricious, which means that they didn't think it was right. And so this is the deadline for the SEC to challenge that decision. And so we'll see if they'll kind of either decide to bend the knee or not, or if they'll just try to decide to fight it or give a new reason for why they should reject the conversion. You know, there's a couple options that they have available to them. But today's the day, so we'll see what the SEC is going to decide to do. Yeah, Sam, I think whatever buys them the most time, I think they're going to request panel appeal, not submit an actual appeal themselves, buy some time, maybe pull that back. But who knows, maybe they just throw in the towel. They could. I mean, I feel like people are attributing a low probability of that. But I mean, they certainly could. Why would you throw in the towel when you don't pay for the legal services that you require? Yeah, that's a good point. I think but I believe the least likely option is that they submit a formal written appeal with a new justification as to why they won't approve it. I think they either go for the panel review from the appellate court or they just say we're done. The other idea is they could agree and then decide to just remove the futures ETFs. But that seems really unlikely, given their size and popularity of the product. They could. They got some options. They got some options. Hold on, the futures market in Bitcoin is like popular? Who even uses that? Fiat Maxis. It's used by institutional traders for hedging and all kinds of things. People think it's very popular. It's like a security. Someone needs to do a meme like in that movie Castaway where he's talking to the volleyball and he points and he's like, no, we got time. We got time. And they got to replace it with Gensler. I don't have the skills. Michelle, what's up? Hey, guys. So I don't want to derail the conversation completely from the macro, but I did want to make a little bit of an announcement. This morning, I bought gas in SATs over Lightning. We are beta testing our merchant system, and we've integrated it at a Shell gas station here in Sarasota, Florida. I pinned a tweet into the nest. And everything went well, which is super exciting because I'm the product developer. It worked. And so if anybody's in Florida and wants to come to Sarasota, you can buy gas with Bitcoin. Gas priced in Bitcoin. Let's go. That's fucking awesome, Michelle. What's the scaling look like on this thing? Well, we're still beta testing. There's a couple of features on the back end that need some updates and some tweaking. There's some features that are coming down the line that we kind of want to roll out before we really scale it. But we have five or six merchants that are each testing different pieces of the system. We have a full API integration. We have a couple of e -commerce tools and then the actual merchant terminal. For a lot of the gas stations where we have ATMs established, we'll probably be the first sort of set of adopters. So we're kind of slow rolling it. But if anybody is out there and wants to accept Bitcoin, feel free to DM me or fight federal, and we'll get you set up. if So just I'm understanding correctly, the product just kind of makes it easier for merchants to integrate with Lightning and accept Lightning payments. Cool. What was your mission? Go ahead, Sam. Sorry. Well, no, I'm just I'm curious to learn more about it, Michelle. So what's your guy's goal? Why did you guys start to build out this product? And where do you see it kind of fitting in to Bitcoin's adoption as well as why did you guys build it? What problem are you trying to solve? Yeah, sure. Well, it's really about Bitcoin and Lightning adoption. So Byte Federal is one of the oldest ATM companies. I think they're kind of one of the least known right now because they've grown really slowly. But everything is built in -house. We build all of the ATMs here in Florida. We built all the software that runs the ATMs, and we host everything that happens within the ecosystem. And prior to me joining the team, we have a wallet. We're in the process of redesigning and rebranding the wallet. But the goal really is to enable full -scale circular economies with the ATM, our wallet, and then the merchant piece, which is like a merchant terminal. Of course, if you have like at a farmer's market and you're just a sole proprietor, you can always do a direct peer -to -peer transaction and accept Bitcoin or Lightning directly into your wallet. But we have a lot of merchants that host our ATMs, and they have bigger needs, and they want like a physical terminal, and they want an integration into their existing systems. So we've been working on building that. That's super cool. I think like merchant adoption of Bitcoin and accepting Lightning is kind of the next wave adoption. of And I know like Parker Lewis is kind of focused on that now. And merchant adoption, it's like demanding to be paid in Bitcoin. Each merchant doing that is going to build on itself and kind of drive Bitcoin adoption forward as it continues to be used more and more as like a medium exchange for goods and services. I think it's kind of early days in that, but I think that is the next wave. And it just occurs at each merchant. So building the infrastructure and easier tools for them to accept Lightning is definitely a crucial step. So Michelle, that's awesome. So cool to hear. Peter, what's up? Hey, Michelle, are the merchants able to convert into fiat if they want? Or is it just they take Lightning and then they do with it what they want after the fact? Yeah, there is a conversion option. So of course, our bills are still in fiat. So there is an ACH withdrawal feature that's built in. And they can either hold the Bitcoin or SATs in there. They can hold it if they want. But no, there is an option to cash out in fiat. And it's an ACH settlement. Are you targeting specific individuals who are already Bitcoiners? Or is this more about, you know what I mean? I mean, what's the market? Kind of. Yeah, kind of. So the guy that we set up today is near our office. He has a very successful ATM, a very active ATM. And the reason for that is because he is super into Bitcoin. He's a Bitcoiner, right? And so when people come into his gas station, he's like, hey, you can buy Bitcoin here. Like, I know you're here for gas or a soda, but you can also get Bitcoin. So he's really like a Bitcoin evangelist. And so we have developed a relationship with him. And he actually informed a lot of the decisions that we made as we were building the product.
The Plant Movement Podcast
Who's Behind the Contentious New Heat Ordinance in Miami Dade?
"You think there's a reason why it's targeting our industries? Do they want nurseries and farmers down here in Miami -Dade County? They want us out of here and construction workers because it makes it almost impossible for a peaceful working place because you can, you know, it can be a battle zone. I think it's the organization that's pushing it. And I think it's, I think it's for attorneys, the benefits attorneys for the lawsuits and unionizing the workforce. Do you think that the organization that's doing this, do you think that they know the effects of what this will cause to this strong, powerful, impactful, wonderful, beautiful industry and the construction industry? I don't believe, the politicians for sure don't. Okay. Because I mean, they're just thinking, they're making themselves look good, feel good by trying to pass something that we already have rules in place for. And no, I don't think they realize how, I don't even think the politicians read it all the way through before they got proposed. They did not understand how it would have, or even think about how it would affect us. And they didn't ask us. They didn't ask. I'm just going to keep going on like, man, you know, like, Hey, you know, everybody has my phone number. I asked, I told him he came to one of the ag practice board meetings unannounced and I told him, you didn't talk to anyone. I'm president of Farm Bureau. I know every farmer in the area because I grew up here and not, you did not talk to anyone. He couldn't answer it. So he just danced around it. And I see that you guys are very passionate about it and me as well. You know, I'm born and raised out here, 17 years with Costa, you, your whole life, fourth generation, 1905, 1907. You know, so these, these guys are very credible in just their passion behind it and why they feel a certain way. It's not fair to the community at the end of the day. We're just, we're just trying to make it happen. You know, we have the economy against us. We have competition against us. We have price hikes against us. We have labor shortages against us. We have so many things up against us. And now we're getting slapped with something else that, that could potentially felt like, yeah, this can sink the ship. This one. Yeah. And look, and it just felt, it felt personal, you know, because it's like, you're, you're taking the word of one organization that we don't care about our people. Come on. And, and no one knows, you know, that we, like we are, we're, we're upset. We take it personally because we do every day. No, and you can go and everyone has a smile. You can go to any nursery here and say hi to the guy that's attending you. And I guarantee you who have a smile on his face. And that's just how it is out here. And real quick, the statistics that they keep quoting about people getting sick from the heat or having heat exhaustion or deaths or any of that. Go look and see where that's from. It's a lot of people from the city. It's the people from out of town that are not used to the heat. The elderly who might not have air conditioning. That aren't working even in agriculture. And the tourist, they just happen to be in Miami -Dade County. You got to look at the details, but it's not our employees in the area.
RADCast Outdoors
A highlight from Wives Takeover Special: Crystal & Krista in the Drivers Seat
"Fish on! Hey, Radcast is on! And welcome to the show, Mr. Jim Zumbo. Gentlemen, I am pleased to be here and I use that term loosely when I say gentlemen. Al Winder. Just want to welcome you to the show. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to hang out with us on a podcast for a little bit. I am looking forward to it. Nothing makes me happier than to be clocking the box. Hailing from Wisconsin, Janna Waller. Thanks so much for having me. It's Radcast. Hunting, fishing, and everything in between. Powered by Bowspider. Brought to you by PK Lures and High Mountain Seasonings. And now here's your hosts, Patrick Edwards and David Merrill. Today is a very special episode of Radcast Outdoors because we've kicked the guys out of the studio. We are the wives of the Radcast Outdoors hosts. I am Crystal Merrill. And I'm Krista Edwards. And we are here because we're going to talk about what it's like to be married to someone who is quite literally obsessed with the great outdoors. So the guys are definitely in trouble. Yeah, that's right. We are going to have a good time. We're good. We kicked them out. No boys allowed. And just dive into what it's like to be married and have kids with an outdoors enthusiast. That's obsessed. Yeah. As we know, our husbands love hunting and fishing. David is a hunter and Patrick is a little bit more of a fisherman. So tell me about your experience in the outdoors, Krista. So I was raised down in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I was my dad's fishing buddy as a kid. We would go fishing just at the lakes that are close by. So the Curt Gowdy State Park lakes, he would take us trout fishing. And then as I got a little older, we would go camping with my grandparents on their pop -up camper trailer. I love doing that. My grandpa, I remember, took us to Hog Park and the Miracle Mile and we got to do some fishing there. I've always liked being outside. I've never been an enthusiast of any sorts or anything, but I've always enjoyed being outside hunting, just outdoor recreational activities as well. How about you? I have the same experience as a kid. I was immersed in the outdoors. My dad was a trapper and a hunter and a little bit of a fish or two. There's a picture that exists of me in a diaper standing in front of a bunch of skinned raccoons in Oregon. That does exist. But when I was a teenager, shot my first black tail deer in Oregon, which is where I grew up. And then in 2009, my dad invited me over here to Wyoming, which is now where I live and love, to an antelope hunt out here in the middle of near Riverton, Wyoming. We got a nice antelope. My husband and I, David, we both shot antelope that time. And then we decided to go explore our lives and travel around a little bit. But eventually we did end up back here in Wyoming. Awesome. What do you love about Wyoming? Except for last year? I love the climate. Yeah, that was brutal. The negative 50s was a little bit much last winter. But I love the open wide open spaces. I love the people how friendly they are and just kind and wholesome and morals. I just love the people here. Yeah, I agree. I have really just grown to love Wyoming. I love the mountains. I love all the outdoor recreational opportunities. I love that you can make close relationships because our biggest towns are still small ones. So it's a small world. I don't ever imagine living anywhere else. We love Wyoming. How about you tell me how you met David and how your relationship came to be? We both grew up in Oregon. We actually met in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. I was a Forest Protection Officer working for the Forest Service. And there's this little mountain house store in the middle of nowhere. And so I would stop in there and I'd get like candy or soda or something on my way. And David was actually a cook there and friends with the owners. He didn't have enough gump to introduce himself to me. So the owner of the store, because David and I were like 17 and 19. When we met, the owner of the store forcibly introduced us and basically told us we were going on a date. And so I think the next day I drove up to the mountain house after work and we watched a movie and talked all night. And that's the history of David and Crystal. The rest is history as they say, right? How about you guys? How did you and Patrick meet? I think we met a couple of times before we actually I don't know. Patrick says that we've met we had met previously, but we actually graduated high school together. We're in the same graduating class. I have vague memories of him there. But we officially started we're introduced by a mutual friend when we were in college down in Cheyenne at the community college down there. One of the new weeks of school, he was standing in line waiting for food. And we because we had been introduced, we started a conversation. He let me cut in line with him for food. We had lunch that day and just started talking and getting to know each other. And like he said, rest is history. We were also young. We were both 19 when we started dating when we first met. We've been married 17 years now. And we have four children, which Patrick has mentioned on the podcast before. Leah, our faith, who is 10. And Benjamin, who is nine, I have to think about that sometimes because they're, they stair step down. How about you? How long have you and David been married? So we've been married 17 years as well. We both I think we both got married in 2006. Didn't we? Yep. Okay. So yeah, we got married in 2006 in Oregon. And yeah, that's the rest of history. So when you first met Patrick, did you really know how obsessed he was with fishing? Because we lived in Cheyenne, I don't know what his passion was when it came to fishing. The opportunities in the Cheyenne area are much less than it is up here in Riverton. And his grandma lived in Riverton. And so when we were first dating, he would come up and visit her, but I didn't always come. So he would fish when he came up here. And then when I would come and visit, we would go fishing. But because it was so sporadic, I didn't realize just what the full depth of the obsession of the hobby, the passion was at that time. So no, I didn't realize when we were married for a few years in 2008, we moved up to Riverton for the first time to help with with his grandma and to help care for her. And it was then a couple years into our marriage that I fully got a full view of how much he really loved it because he had the proximity of Boysen and the ability to go more often. So those I would consider some of our harder years of marriage as we were figuring this out being newlyweds, and also him having these opportunities to go and fish and want to do both be a good husband and stay home but also pursue his hobbies and his passion. So it was then that I really got a full grasp on that. What have you done throughout the years as you've adjusted to being married and realizing how much he loves fishing? What do you guys do together? Do you guys go fishing together a lot now? Is it a family thing? What's the favorite part of being a wife of a husband who just loves the outdoors and has a passion for it? In the beginning, before we had kids, I would go fishing with him sometimes. I will say when we first were married, and I realized that it was difficult, it did create some fights. And we have some fights early on that are in the history books that we can laugh about now today. But as our family has grown when we had kids, it was a great way for us to get outside as a family. And he loves sharing his passion of fishing with children, whether it's our own or anybody else's, he loves teaching people how to fish. So it's been really awesome to see him share that with our family. So we do go as a family and sometimes I don't even fish. I'm just there as referee, making sure that kids aren't dangling up their lines, or I'm helping them pull them out of the water. So bait the hook. Yeah. So he's able to go on a date nights where I just go with him. It's not my passion. I don't mind doing it. I like doing it. But I mainly like spending the time with him. It's really fun to be able to go do something with him that he enjoys so much. And I know that it fills his bucket fills his love tank, whatever you want to call it to be able to do something he enjoys, and to be able to share that with me and with our children. So we do as a family, sometimes it actually has worked out now that our kids are older, that he'll take a couple and leave a couple home with me and he'll take a couple and so that's actually been a really special thing. It gives him the opportunity to spend one on one time or two on one time with with our kids when you have a big family. Sometimes that gets hard with busy schedules and stuff. I don't always go but I've got to a point now in our marriage where I am supportive of him going. I'm to the point now where I recognize the need for him to go when life has been really crazy and he's been really busy or things that work have been really stressful. I can see it and I will encourage him to go where in our early years of marriage when it was just the two of us and we didn't have kids that would not have been the case. I did not want him to go and leave me home alone. But now I say, I see that there's, you're stressed, you should go for half a day or whatever. Because I know that it just helps to renew him and refresh him. And then when he comes home, he's just able to be more present and attentive to our family. And he's just more at peace. So gotta be the support system for the family. And that doesn't mean you always go on these trips. But it looks different. Maybe it means that you cook the fish that he brings home for all the things for the with fish. I cook don't get me wrong. I do cook but he cooks and cleans. There is a learning curve when it comes to cooking fish. We like to cook together. And but he just is really good at fish specifically. I've done a few things and we usually do it together. But yeah, no, when it comes to fishing, he likes doing it all. He loves the catching. He I don't know if he loves the cleaning, but he does the cleaning and then he helps the cooking as well. It's, it's been great. It's been a great way to enjoy it as a family. How about you do fish or hunt with David? Do you guys so we do as a family? Yeah, we do a little bit of everything. Since I've had kids, I have three kids, the youngest is nine months. And so I don't get out as much as I would like. A couple of years ago, we ended up going over by Cody and I got an elk tag and actually harvested a very nice bowl, my first bull elk ever. We dropped the kids off with grandma and we went over there in the winter and harvested a nice bowl. It was awesome. It was nice to get away and do the things as a couple. Now that we have a bigger family, and it's a little bit harder to get out, get everybody ready. Because as a mom, we know that we get everybody ready, we get all the snacks, we get all the clothes, warm and hot and clothes and everything you need to get ready for a trip. It's a lot. It takes a lot more time to prep and prepare. And it's just a lot of effort when you have the kids. But as far as hunting and fishing, I really do enjoy the time. It brings me closer to God. Honestly, the silence, getting away from all the electronics, just the peace of being out in nature is awesome. And I would love to do it more. But I just have to wait till my kids get a little bit older to make it a little easier on everybody. Right. Absolutely. I feel that connection with the Lord as well being out in nature. And then also, just with my husband, the connection there. I don't know how David is. But I can tell you, like when when I went fishing with Patrick, just the two of us, we went a couple of years ago to Keyhole for an anniversary trip. And he was more excited to see me catch fish than than him catching fish. He was going for a trophy. And sometimes I would just read a book while he was trying. But when we started catching crappie and stuff, he would get so excited. And I imagine David's reaction to you getting a big elk was probably the same. And it's just a really special connection that you can have when they they share their love for that. And then it makes when they see somebody that they love, yes, pursuing what they let's just it. It's a cool way to bond. Yes, it is. I will agree. He was actually there with me when I shot my first black tail deer to we were tree stand hunting behind my house and I was climbing up in the tree and he was going to climb up behind me but the deer is already there. Oh, I know eating some apples from the orchard. And so he's standing down there at the bottom of the tree. And of course, I was waiting to get a good rest. I wasn't going to make a poor shot on my first year. I was very patient. The deal wasn't going anywhere. I had plenty of apples. So I was taking my time to get a good shot made a great shot. It was awesome experience for us to just instill that as a new couple and I wish that more couples would get out and do these things together even if you don't necessarily enjoy the sport. Just supporting your spouse. It's a great way to support your spouse just going, doing whatever you can to support them in their passions. Absolutely. When we were dating, it used to be the joke that I would always outfish Patrick whenever we would go fishing when we were dating and first married and I would tease that's why he didn't take me because I would always outfish him. But the real reason why I'd outfish him is because he would set me up in order to catch catch fish. I know this now. Yeah, back then I would tease that I had better skill. I meant that I was doing a better job. But really, he lovingly set me up in a way that I would I'm gonna give you a better lure or a better bait. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. In order for me to have success because then you have fun doing it together like that. Do you have any specific outdoor memories of your family from your childhood or any memories that are your favorite from being in the outdoors with your family? From my growing up years, one of my favorite outdoor memories was a camping trip that I went on with my grandparents and my uncle. My mom is 17 years older than her youngest brother. So my uncle is only like eight years older than I am. We got to do things with him similar to what you would with like a cousin because of the age difference there. We went and I believe it was down by Miracle Mile in a hog park and camped outside. I'd never slept outside open air, no tent, no camper. And he rolled out the sleeping bag like he was going to sleep outside. And I thought that was the coolest thing. So I slept outside open air next to the lake that we were at with my uncle. And so that was really special. I probably was 11 or 12. I don't even remember how old I was. But it's still a memory that sticks with me. And you didn't get carried away by the mosquitoes. Not that I remember. And I remember that was my first wallet I had ever caught. It was on that trip. I had never caught a wallet before. So that was really cool. And then my family. Oh, so many memories as a family with kids now with Patrick and our family, our younger kids. But one of them that I really love was our first camping trip after Katie was born. So Katie's my second. And Leah would have been a year and a half, two years old. Katie was five weeks old, sitting in a tent, nursing my five week old baby while camping. And this trip was so hectic. We got lost on our way. When we got to the lake, Patrick started catching fish immediately. It was like some of the best fishing he'd ever been to. We went to, I can't remember what it's called, a lake in Nebraska. And when we woke up the next day, we camped one whole night, the whole tent set up, the stress of we had to go home. So it was like less than a 24 hour trip. It was so stressful. And looking on it now, it's not a favorite. If you think, that was a wreck. We were a mess. But at the same time, it was just the beginning of we're just going to go no matter how hard this is, we're going to try anyways. And so that was a jumping off point for us on just family camping trips. And we've done many more, always having good parts and always having stressful parts like using the set up, the extra packing with kids and whatnot. So sleeping out under the stars really reminds me of a funny story from David and I when we were first dating, I was, you know, working for the Forest Service. So I was supposed to know all these different trails and everything and be able to read a map. Well, Crystal forgot the map, we were going to go to Danica Lake in Oregon. It's beautiful. I've been there. I hiked in there for my work. And I was going to take David in there, we're going to go fishing. It took a wrong turn on the trail. And we ended up not going into the wilderness, but staying near like a logging trail. And we came out to a place where I knew I was familiar with it was, we had hiked probably 10 miles that day, Danica Lake was not a 10 mile hike. And we get to a place and we just go to a lake that's right off of the road. It's a gravel road, but it's right off the road. And we were just gonna sleep out underneath the stars, we put a tarp down, had our sleeping bags, and we went to sleep woke up the next morning. And David says, I hear something scratching. Oh my goodness. So we look around us. And because we laid out our stuff almost in dark, we laid our tarp down on top of an ants nests or high ant flow area. And they weren't the small ants. These are the big ants. So he now has an ant in his ear. And we are probably two hours from any hospital or anything. Oh my goodness is before I'm a nurse. So I didn't know what to do. I've never had this encounter before. So we were, he was freaking out because something was in his head, scratching. And he's not a calm person around this kind of things. Anyways, I come up with this idea to drop some water into his ear to flood the ant out. And luckily it worked. But to this day, I will never live down the fact that we never made it to Danica Lake. Oh, you never went back? Never made it. Oh, bummer. So it's always this story of if Crystal plans a trip, are we really gonna make it to Danica Lake? Or are we gonna make it somewhere else? You just never know. And then as far as outdoor stories with my family, one of my favorite memories is when I harvested a moose here in Wyoming in 2017. We didn't know the area. So we were just hiking around and we came across a bull moose that was shootable. And the awesome thing was, my oldest son Hunter was probably three or four at the time. And he was on the shoulders of David. David was carrying him when I shot my moose. Oh, cool. So we had this experience together. My father in law was there too. We shot this moose and my son was able to be a part of that experience. And not that he is super enthusiastic about hunting yet. He's 10. And so he's interested in video games and other things like that. But it's a great family memory for us to remember. And then with my middle child, Drake, my dad took me out around Riverton to get an antelope and antelope buck because I for some reason when we first moved here, I drew antelope buck tags almost every year. Nice. Nobody else did. I don't know. So I got to spend that time with the Drake as well when I was harvesting that antelope buck and there's pictures of him sitting on my lap with the antelope and we harvested it together. We butchered it together at home. We do actually most of our own butchering and processing of our meats. That's great. And I think Patrick does the same, doesn't he? With his fish and whatever. Absolutely. Yeah. And the kids, it's a great way to teach them. It's one of those things that kind of get lost in our culture. I feel like today where a lot of kids and I'm not saying necessarily Wyoming kids because we live in a state where it's a little unique, but a lot of times kids don't know where their food comes from. And so whether it is game, wild game and fish, or it's things like poultry and pork and beef, we both have chickens on our properties and we raise pigs. And I know that you guys have done so in the past before. It's just such a good experience for kids to see the whole process. It's not just I went to the store and bought the ass. We went, when you hunt, you harvest it as well as bring it home, clean it, cook it, and then eat it. Same when you raise your own animals or eggs or whatever. It's just good for kids to know that it's not just go to the grocery store, that there is work involved, that it's not actually that easy. And it just brings a greater appreciation for your food as well as for the people who do, our farmers and our ranchers, who raise the food that we eat. And the quality of your food. Absolutely. That's what I love about processing my own game is you can be super fine with how you butcher it. You can be selective with the meats and you can, we do a lot of hamburger. It's not hamburger, it's elk burger, venison burger. Right. We treat it like hamburger and it tastes delicious and we love it and my kids love it and all of these different recipes that we have that we use with wild game because it cooks differently. Absolutely. You can't just cook elk like you can a normal beef steak. It takes a little more love and tenderness for sure. So talking about our kids and getting them involved. So you have three boys, 10, four and nine months, right? Yes. So with your kids, what have you found to be ways to get them outdoors? Because it is extra work, you do have to prepare. You're not just thinking about going to and hunting or going to the lake and fishing. You have to think about all their needs and all the things that you might need for the day to keep them occupied or whatever. So what kinds of tips and things have you found that help? And then also, how have you been motivated to make sure you get your kids outdoors because it is extra work? So how have you motivated yourself to continue doing the work to get them there? So some of the things that I have found that works for my kids to keep them, for lack of a better word, entertained during hunting because it's not always entertaining. They can play with sticks and rocks but they do eventually get bored and then they do eventually get hungry and or cold or hot. So you have to plan for those things because you want for kids the experience to be a positive one. You don't want them to look back and say, oh, I was so cold or I was so hungry and mom and dad didn't have any snacks for me. So you got to plan for those things. Sometimes you do better than others. As far as what I do to the effort, it is important to put that effort out. Yes, it is time consuming but I know it's good for their soul. It's good for my soul to get out even if we just go to Ocean Lake or Morton Lake for the evening and go fishing. It's beautiful to get sit on the beach, listen to the waves come in. It's therapeutic for everybody and it helps everybody's mental health. We just love taking those opportunities to do those small things and I know you do the same thing with your family as well. We do and I always tease that I could be talked out of it every single time. Easily. Yes, especially like the first camping trip of the year when you have to get the camper cleaned and prepped and make sure your supplies are there. Every time we're getting ready to go camping for the first time, I always think we don't have to do this. We can stay home of effort. So much work and so I say that about every trip. You could tell me and say, would you rather stay home? I'd probably say yes to you on a heartbeat. So don't offer that as an option because otherwise I'll probably take you up on it. It's worth it once you get there. You take all the time to prepare the food and to pack all the clothes and to clean up and get the dogs ready and whatever else it is that you need to do in order to get yourselves there. But once you're there and you're set up and you're in nature and you're able to not worry about all the at -home chores and busyness and schedule and you're just able to soak in whatever it might be, it's so worth it. So it's worth the time. It's worth the effort and start. My tip would be to start young. Don't wait till your kids are old enough to hold the fishing pole or do whatever because if you just make it part of your lifestyle to just go and do and be together as a family, then it will get to a point where your kids will look forward to those times. One of the things I also tease about like where people say camping is relaxing and I'm like you have never gone camping with kids. However, we, my family doesn't have little kids anymore. You guys still have a few, a toddler and a baby. But when we got went camping a couple years ago and our kids range from ages 11 to seven and we were able to go and Pat would go fishing and I got to sit in my chair and talk to my friends or read a book and my kids were running around and playing with their friends and and they were all over the place night. I looked at it and I go, oh we've arrived.
The Crypto Conversation
A highlight from Versatus - The Most Versatile DevEx in Web3
"Hi everyone, Andy Pickering here, I'm your host and welcome to the Crypto Conversation, a Brave New Coin podcast where we talk to the people building the future in the Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency space. Hey team, we have a new sponsor here at the Crypto Conversation, BitGet, one of the world's leading copy trading cryptocurrency exchanges, yes indeed. What happens if you've got the funds to invest but you don't have the time to keep track of the market? You still want to make smart money moves, what do you do? Well copy trading is a popular choice for beginner traders. You can shorten your learning curve by uncovering tips and strategies from more experienced traders. BitGet's copy trading platform has over 80 ,000 elite traders to choose from and 380 ,000 followers just like yourself who are already using the BitGet copy trading platform as a potential passive income stream. All it takes is one click, you can subscribe to an elite profitable strategist, set your limits, automate your orders and monitor their trades. I've got some links in the show notes below, one link will take you through to the BitGet sign up page, give you a VIP discount. So learn all about it for yourself, thanks to BitGet. And now it is on with the show. My guest today is Andrew Smith, Andrew is the founder of Versatus Labs, building out the most versatile DevEx in Web3. Welcome to the show Andrew. Thanks for having me Andy. It is a pleasure, let's do what we do at the beginning of the show Andrew, it would be great if you could please introduce yourself. I'd love to hear a little bit about your, I guess, personal and professional backstory, what you've been doing that has led you to founding Versatus Labs. Yeah, absolutely. So I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, which is where I now reside again. I did do a stint in Denver, Colorado and an extended stint in Los Angeles. So I was gone from my hometown for about 12 years. I programming started at the age of 14, a technology teacher and seventh grade enemy, the classic, the C programming language book and said, learn this, I think it's going to be important. And so I did, never really did much as a kid other than like, you build like space invader clones and C and a couple of other things. Picked up Python and C++ a little bit later in life, during high school and, you know, was very, very interested in the cross -section of like machine learning and AI and economics. Economics is really sort of my first love, even though I'm a programmer, I kind of always wanted to be an economist, but just found that there's not really a lot of money in it unless you work for a political campaign. So it wasn't going to do that. And programming and machine learning in particular was something that I thought I could apply my love and knowledge of economics to. So it was building machine learning algorithms very, very early on before you add any of the sort of open source tools that you have today that makes it easy. And was sending my resume and GitHub around to a bunch of different hedge funds. Yes, this was going back about 10, 11 years now. And finally found one that was willing to give me a little bit of money to play around with. It's a group called Trident Asset Management. They're based part -time out of Connecticut and part -time out of Colorado, wasn't going to move to Connecticut. So that's what took me to Denver, then did the same thing for a fixed income shop based out of Newport Beach. That's how I ended up in Los Angeles. Started my first startup there, it's called Owl ESG, it's a environmental, social and governance data company built out, you know, some machine learning models and, you know, from PDFs, sort of scraping about 30 ,000 documents a day and extracting the data and building out a ESG data set. Grew that company and then in 2020 decided to start Versatus. So started this sort of hobby project, was doing a solo build on it, spent about 18 months solo building and was talking to a few friends in the space and they thought I was really onto something. So made some introductions, next thing you knew we were raising our first round from jumping big brain, hiring out an engineering team and now 14 months later, here we are. Very nice, very nice. Thank you, Andrew. Give us an idea then of, I guess, your vision for Versatus. What are you guys building? What's the vision? Yeah, so the vision is like the best way to put it, even though this is an imperfect if analogy is you think of like the cloud compute providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, et cetera, you know, they own these huge data centers and these data centers are effectively a commodity business. You know, they build out a warehouse and put a bunch of servers in it, connect those servers to the Internet, occasionally maintain them and update them in and of themselves. They're not really that valuable. What makes them really valuable is that they provide all these tools that make it easy and efficient for developers to interact with those data centers and build applications on top of them to store data inside of them, et cetera. We believe that blockchain is analogous to that. It's not, again, it's an imperfect analogy. But if you kind of view the blockchains that exist in the world today and the ones that will come in the future as those data centers, next generation data centers where we provide value is we provide that program ability layer and compute layer that makes it easy and efficient for developers to build on top of blockchains. So we what we're building is a decentralized compute stack that enables developers to build in any language on any chain. And I think this is really powerful for a number of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll get to. But one of the major barriers to entry for developers is the language barrier. There's also a pretty big tooling barrier as well, which we saw that the language barrier, you know, if you're you want to build in Web3, the first thing you need to do is either go learn Solidity or Rust or one of the other languages. And Rust is a general purpose language. There are some people that already know it, but anybody that's entering into Web3 at the very beginning and they've got to go learn Solidity. Right. So a lot of them just don't view it as worthwhile to go learn Solidity. It's a domain specific language. The only thing you'll ever be able to do with that is build EVM compatible smart contracts. So until and unless there's a robust enough financial incentive for them to actually go and learn Solidity, they're probably not going to. But what we found from doing some pretty significant market research is if they could just use their existing languages and existing tools, they'd be happy to hobby hack and maybe even look for a job or start their own project and build on top of blockchains. So we want to make that process easier. We want to reduce the barrier to entry for developers. We believe that developers precede users, that you need developers to build applications that users actually want to use if we're ever going to see mass adoption for Web3. Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, Andrew. And I've seen you guys talk about this and some of your comms, I guess, because that's kind of it is flipping the script, right? Because everyone thinks, yeah, OK, it's the transition to Web3, easy as just got to build some user user friendly apps and and and if you build it, they will come. But of course, real life has has not been that simple. So so your philosophy is essentially the reverse of that. So you want to attract as many developers as possible. So just talk us through that again. I mean, you have a little bit, but just explain why you think that is really the key to the paradigm shift for Web2 to Web3. Yeah, absolutely. I think like just kind of telling the story of some case studies probably helps here, right? So you never know where a killer app is going to come from. I mean, Facebook started as a dating app for Ivy Leaguers, right? And it's Harvard and Yale dating app. You know, Slack started as a video game studio and Slack was their internal messaging network. So and now that is the product. Killer applications oftentimes come from experimentation. And the more experiments you have going on, the higher the probability that you're going to find stuff that people actually want to interact with and use. There are some precursors to what makes a killer app, things that make people's lives more convenient. That's just undeniably is going to make their life better, makes their work more productive. These are usually more business applications, makes the world more connected. These are social media type of applications or makes their life more affordable. So things that create efficiencies that reduce the cost of things that they were already doing. So, look, if I knew what that killer app was going to be, I'd probably go build that. It probably would be easier. But what I what I think where I think killer apps come from is lots of developers trying lots of things and competing for the limited funding and resources out there. And then you have unfortunately you do have gatekeepers in the world that you have VCs and you have investors and angel investors. So typically, yeah, there's going to be some stuff that's lost in the process of gathering funding and everything else that might have been really cool. But really, like if you have lots of things competing, probably the cream rises to the top and you're going to get well -funded, really interesting application ideas that can then promote themselves and attract users. The users are going to come for the applications right now. We have sort of the most users will ever have. If this is all we ever have to offer, which is effectively gambling and speculation, I think we've captured the gambling market pretty, pretty, pretty well. The speculator market we captured pretty well. They're here to make money off of token price fluctuations. If we want people that are here for the long term to use applications, well, we need to offer the applications that they want to use. And I think where that comes from, it's largely a numbers game. It's Pareto principle, you know, 10 percent, 20 percent of the developers are going to create the applications that get 80 percent, 90 percent of the users. So if we want to have a bigger 20 percent of applications that get lots of users, we need a bigger 100 percent. We need a bigger pie in general. And the only way to get a bigger pie is to reduce the cost, both time and money cost of building in Web3. And that's what we're attempting to do, particularly on the on the time cost of things, reduce the opportunity cost of learning how to build in Web3 by making it easier for them to build in Web3. So that's really sort of how we think about this. We think that developers necessarily are a precursor to users. If you look at like some of the market research we've done, it's kind of an either or like if there were more users, developers would take the time to learn this stuff. But the problem is, is that there's not going to be more users until developers learn how to build this stuff. So that's kind of where we see ourselves. We we believe we can be the catalyst for a Cambrian explosion of Web3 developers coming from all different walks of life, bring in product managers that they can understand how to manage a project that's being built in Python or Go or C++, but may not understand how to manage a project that's being built in Solidity, bring in on, you know, entrepreneurs that they come into this space and they look at, OK, well, how do I build a team out to build this? And what they see is extremely high cost of talent acquisition because there just isn't that big of a pool of Solidity developers. So make the talent pools that they can hire from significantly bigger, reduce that cost. Now you get some of those non -technical entrepreneurs looking at Web3 as a way to build their application. That's kind of the way we look at it. Just make the process easier, reduce those barriers. You'll get that first wave who's like jumping at the bit to come into Web3 and then they'll build some apps. You'll get more users. You'll then get the next wave of developers who see that there's financial incentives to doing so. It's going to be a process. It's going to take time. But we believe within the next seven to 10 years, if you offer up the correct tools and stacks, that about a third of all applications will be built on decentralized stacks for a number of different reasons, which we could talk to if you'd like. But that's where we see our value proposition is we make it easier for them. They come in, they build, then you get the users, then more come in and build, and so forth and so forth. You create a flywheel effect. OK, well, thank you, Andrew. And look, we don't need to get too deep into the weeds, but just talking about that decentralized stack, I suppose that you guys are building at Versatus. You have your own layer one blockchain, right? And there's the consensus mechanism, I believe, is proof of claim. So maybe just give us the kind of the two minute overview of your stack, I suppose. Yeah, so our L1 is primarily used for content addressing programs that are deployed to our network. So this is a way that our compute nodes can verify that they're executing the correct programs and such that watcher nodes and validators can also ensure that those compute nodes are not acting maliciously, that they're executing the correct programs. Our consensus mechanism, so proof of claim is actually our election mechanism. So this is how we elect nodes to quorums. Our consensus mechanism, we call it farmer harvester. Basically, it's a modification of what many distributed systems engineers would know as the worker collector model, but to fit a Byzantine fault tolerant model. So in your worker collector model, you basically have worker nodes that are individual nodes that they're allocated compute tasks. They execute those compute tasks and return the results to a collector node, which collects them and does batch updates into a database or to wherever they're storing state in our model. You don't want to have single nodes doing this work because then if a single node is malicious, they can actually create have state altering transactions that are incorrect. So we do have we form quorums as opposed to having single nodes. And then 60 percent of that quorum needs to what we call redundant, redundantly execute the program. So redundantly execute the program, return results, agree on results and then send votes to the what we call the harvester quorum. So, again, instead of having a single collector, we have a quorum of collectors that they then need to agree on the threshold of votes being reached before they would commit that to a block. So that's sort of very high level overview of how our architecture works. Now, again, like our goal is to enable language agnosticism on top of every chain. So not just for our L1, but on top of Ethereum, on top of other chains as well. And the primary reason for having our own L1 is it's a place where we can efficiently prove that compute nodes in our network are using the correct program, they're executing the correct program. And it's also a place where we can accrue value to those compute nodes. So whether they're being paid by another network's native token or they're being paid for executing compute on our network, we can emit our native tokens to them as an L1. So they're bootstrapped. And that way they're earning some money off of it. And then also it's a place where we can accrue fees back to our own L1 so that those compute nodes have a place where they're getting paid. Got it. Thank you, Andrew. If we kind of zoom out then to some more kind of, I guess, just a general state of where we are and the slow transition from Web 2 to Web 3. You saw a lot of the big brands, big financial institutions start to experiment with blockchain, but they were kind of like, they weren't really interested in building on Bitcoin or Ethereum. They went down the route of building their own private blockchains, which was a little bit pointless perhaps in hindsight. And now we're seeing with so many different chains around now and much more interoperability, brands and institutions are recognizing that it's to their benefit and everyone to build on the decentralized stacks that you're talking about. So maybe just you look at, I'd love you to paint a picture of, I suppose, your ideas of where we are now and your vision for what the next steps are just over, I guess, the next wave of adoption, maybe what's going to ignite the next hype cycle. How do you think about this? Yeah, so it's an interesting question. I try to steer away from predictions as much as possible. If I were a better investor, I probably would just be investing and making money that way. I do think the key, going back to hate to just sort of beat a dead horse, but the key is going to be getting more developers and whether those are enterprise developers, which I think what we're building provides a lot of value to enterprises. Again, they don't need to go out and hire a bunch of solidity developers that have four or five, six years experience. They can hire much more experienced developers or use the existing developers they have on staff. That to me is the key. I think we need more people trying things, pushing the limits of what's possible on top of this technology in order for us to find the use cases that are going to lead to mass adoption. I also think that enterprises, there are potentially some use cases for enterprise blockchains, but for the most part, I think one of the things that steered enterprises away from using public blockchains were privacy concerns. Right now, if you were to have a corporate wallet on top of Ethereum, everybody knows how much money you have in that. I think that level of transparency is something that scares a lot of enterprises and the closer we move towards being able to have on -chain privacy, so provability, but without revealing the underlying values, the more you'll see enterprises adopt public blockchains as a place, as a development environment, as a place to build and deploy applications to both internal applications as well as consumer facing or other business facing applications. But I think you've got to solve that privacy issue. Transparency is good when needed. It's also something that can be a deterrent to particularly large publicly traded companies who have to report to the SEC, who get audited, all these other things. They don't want all of this information, their financial information public. So finding ways to create some privacy around that I think will probably help with enterprise adoption. Yeah, yeah. Makes perfect sense, Andrew. What about, how does AI fit into this? I know it's a little bit of a tangent, but I've seen you guys talk a little bit about AI. I think you've probably got some opinions. So yeah, I mean, anything you want to kind of speculate on in terms of the, I guess the intersection of AI and web3 in the future? So in one word, trust, I think that's the key is that we're able to offer trust is very, very expensive. And I'm not talking about just necessarily blockchain trust, but trust in general. It's very expensive and it's at the core of how and why society works. If you don't have trust, society breaks down. So we have to trust each other, that we have our individual best interests in mind. And as a result of us trusting that we each want to do what's best for ourselves, we know that we're not going to put ourselves in a situation to damage each other because that might hurt ourselves. So having trust in AI models is going to be really, really important. And right now that mechanism works because OpenAI runs it and OpenAI is a big company, they have profit motives, but it's all centralized. As we move to a world where there's decentralized AI models, there needs to be some way to trust that that AI model is not malicious. And I think blockchain can be a huge component of that and tokenization, staking, and being able to lend trust to compute models is a really important component of it. I think it's an area where we fit in really, really well in particular. So that to me is the most obvious intersection of AI and blockchain. Particularly when it comes to things like deep fakes, I think you want to be able to have some verifiability behind images. You want to have some verifiability behind videos. You can just imagine a scenario where somebody creates a deep fake there's and no way to prove that this came from an AI model, and all of a sudden chaos ensues in a city or in a region or in a country because of some deep fake that people think is real. So there are a lot of concerns around fake news use cases for AI, and how do we solve for that problem? How do we put a marker on that image or on that video that proves that this came from a model and having some sort of watermark of trust? I think that crypto can provide that in some ways. So that's one area. I also think there's a lot of concern about existential threats related to AI and decentralizing AI models and getting them out of the hands of individuals and into the hands of communities, open sourcing them, and then providing incentives around building these models in a way to where they won't create existential threats. I don't think we're quite there yet. I'm less of an AI doomer than a lot of people. But to the AI doomers, I would say use crypto as a way to provide some of these guarantees that your model is not going to go off the rails.
WCPT 820
"first farmers" Discussed on WCPT 820
"Being that they're not involved in, right? So anyway, all right, so I'm just I'm calm for the moment. And also you call me, Jodi. And I thought I made everything weird. Will you make it weird and weirdly calm me and send her me as well? Okay. Thanks. Russell in North Carolina, hello, Russell. Hey, Stephanie, earlier you were talking about Trump going over to Scotland to his golf course and you said that you remembered there was some kind of trouble and you could remember what it was. There's actually a film that was put out by a group that we're trying to pick into this ecologically sensitive area and then when Trump moved in there, they switched over to him. And what he did was, you know, he ripped off the contractor as he proved over people with a tax base. And pay his bills. Imagine that. Well, yeah. You're so new for him. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, there was this one guy, one farmer, multi generational farm did just refuse to sell. So Trump had them bulldozed this ecologically sensitive marsh and put a 40 foot wall firm wall around his entire farm as punitive and cut his water off for like half a year until they had to sue to finally get his water put back on. And that's the kind of guy it was. I mean, they have no integrity. The Republicans have no integrity. And they have a reason. I just like the amount of amount of ways they use the word wank when he killed it. Yeah. Well, real quick, the maga make America grovel again. That's what they're trying to do. That's what it should be from now on. They're trying to make America grovel again. Yep, absolutely. All right. By the way, Jody, I think a lot of people are getting fed up with what the media and the pundits are telling us and what the polls say and what. First of all, I think 18, 19 months before an election, people don't like to be told. Like, oh, this is what's going to happen. Victor she the official stem cell of the Stephanie Miller. I was in saying, ironically, all the young people he talks to are really fired up about. I mean, I think a lot of people get the threat to our democracy. James Clyburn. People are on fire for the Biden Harris ticket. Unlike anything I've seen in South Carolina before. And our guest speaker was the last night for the dinner, which took place just before the fish ride. Was a governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina. Carolina. He was on fire. I'll tell you. It was one of the best nights that I've experienced in South Carolina politics. Can I just say, Jody, you know what we were saying as an out of caller kind of implies Trump's business model of his whole life has been broad. Fox's business model is lying. They're not quirks
The BOB & TOM Show Free Podcast
"first farmers" Discussed on The BOB & TOM Show Free Podcast
"Yes. Big fan. Plain peanut, dark chocolate, peanut. Oh, bag. Crazy. Right down there. I couldn't possibly have more than three or four M and M's. I have about maybe 5. I have a friend who's an M and M. You ate them? No, he's the red M and M. And then I'm sure the most confusing Super Bowl commercial. I don't even, I can't quite. I didn't see it. I don't know. I don't get it. Did you see anybody see it? No. And the placing the M and M characters and now she's not or something. I was way too complicated. Marijuana farmers can not declare that their bud is organic because only the federal government can do that, and they consider pot illegal. That's funny. One farmer in California's central valley is differentiating his product in a unique way. Yes, Mitch Davis is using another well-known classification to make his cannabis stand out from the back. Cage free. And to assure consumers that it's extra clean and pure, you're close. Oh, it's not cage free. It's not free rein. Wild? It's kosher. Kosher. He, along with rabbi, Levi, zircon, have developed kosher certification standards for marijuana. Wow. Davis explained that to be kosher, quote you have to not have bugs, not have pest infestation, and you have to go through the inspection. Here we have with this rabbi zirkin, which one of you is gonna do the best. Man, can you? I have a question. Can you smoke it on a Saturday? Or you can't know you get lighter. You can't lie. You'd have to have a guest coming. That's an interesting idea. I wonder what I've got to see if I can find out what they're calling it. Oh boy. Kosher pot. I mean, wouldn't you go with something funny like Acapulco Goldstein? Or
TuneInPOC
"first farmers" Discussed on TuneInPOC
"Giant Smith on Tuesday show, good morning, my name is Jamie mciver is the best for the country. It's brought to you by rabobank up next. The minister of agriculture and trade Damian O'Connor responds to James comments. And now it's Geico's motorcycle rules of the road. Avoid biking in The Rain and never touch another person's bike. Hey guys, look at these bikes. So shiny. Whoops. I'm gonna leave a note. Oh gosh, there's more. And the rule for saving on motorcycle insurance is, in 15 minutes, Geico could save you 15% or more. MVP's bonus days are back at Lowe's. Right now, get a special bogo offer from Bosch. By select Bosch 18 Volt bear tool, get a battery free. Shop savings on all of our top pro items. Plus, MVPs are up to three times bonus points on select products. Join today and redeem points for products designed to level up your business. Don't miss MVP's bonus days happening now at Lowe's. Pricing an office subject to change at any time. Bonus points calculated before taxes and fees after applicable discounts if any vowed through 9 23. Heard my little sense is buying a car. You'll need my secret guide. Gross, no way. I already used capital one auto navigator. I bet your credit score wasn't impacted at all. So I got my real rape and monthly payment had an amazing test driver at the dealership and made the purchase. Taking the easy way out. That's so you. Still not getting it. That's so you. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at Capital One dot com slash auto navigator. Take advantage of outstanding offers on select new and demonstrative Mercedes Benz models during Mercedes with all applicable on road costs included in the price. The days are ticking away to visit your authorized Mercedes Benz retailer today. Decency supply offerings steady 1st of October. Bailey's care debris altogether better. But what does that mean? For the locals, brook Yates and dean Pugh, that means doing what they love in their local community. So if you're looking to sell in the way macadamia district, you can be confident the locals were negotiate the best result for your lifestyle or rural property. Sell with the locals, brook Yates and debut, a Bailey's get to breathe. Licensed Ari a 2000 8. There's a Bailey's dot co dot NZ forward slash altogether better. American Airlines is back with an incredible return economy airfare from $1433 to the U.S. from November. From $1433 return economy, flying to rate daily from Auckland, TC's travel dates and exclusion supply. Book now, AA dot com. Twice. Get your breakouts all right. We're just a new word even if you heard get your breaks checked out and seek for a place rebuilding reconditioning relining reusing recycling. All the hours at safe outbreaks. Take the sustainable approach by not throwing away bright components, which can be rebuilt by safe up brakes. Trust the experts at safe outbreaks, part of the Bosch cast service network for all your car service needs. Corner Fitzgerald and chewing. We've turned the page on COVID with cases low access to new medicines and hive vaccination levels, it's now safe to move on from the traffic light system. You're now only required to wear masks when visiting health and aged care facilities. If it is positive, you still need to isolate for 7 days, but others in your house no longer need to. We're moving forward with certainty. Carpal tear or visit COVID-19 geo VT dot NZ. I can't see so has your day been boring, but I'm gonna have a look at this. Wow, that's cool. It's the new crystal payroll interface, while of the colors. It even has a dark mode, no ha ha ha. It's good for the eyes. And your eyes need all the help they can get. Hey. Crystal payroll. It's even clearer. The best of the country, with rabobank. Choose the bank with a huge network of progressive farming clients. Rabobank, our news talks at B Damien O'Connor as the minister of agriculture and trade. I know he just caught the end of Jane smith's comments there, pine trees or protein. And changing the name of our most iconic television program from country calendar to carbon calendar shots fired Damian O'Connor, she makes a point though. Well, I look, I don't think any government has wanted to tell farmers or landowners who they should sell to or what they should do with their land. I think that basically Keenan have learned ownership and has always been available and whether it's shifting from sheep and beef into dairy with its going from dairy into sheep milk or whatever. I think that flexibility is something that all New Zealanders in farmers have held and I don't think we want to ensure we're not talking about one farmer selling to another farmer here we're talking about a farmer or a property owner selling their farm their sheep and beef farm to Ikea or someone like that to go and to forestry. So that's selling it to foreign ownership. You're selling the family silverware. So are you saying that we should interfere with New Zealand farmers and who they should sell to? Well, you've stopped foreigners coming in and buying houses, haven't you? Yes, we have. What's the difference? It's foreign investors. What is the difference? Well, are you saying these are the people who are selling? Do you think that we should interfere with who people sell to? Well, I think you should have some limitations on it otherwise will sell the whole shooting works. Well, I know nothing. Well, you suggest a limitation and this is the issue. I put to many people does ownership matter. I personally believe it does. It's really crucial and as we work across our economy and all paths, but whether it's houses, whether it's businesses, whether it's family, it is important, but then those people who buy expect it to buy rights with that and some of those are qualified for the remain in other things, but governments are very cautious about interfering with them. But you guys have been as weak as P I double S on this one Damien, all these overseas offshore investors are snaking through the back door, you know it, Stuart national. Look, we have laws that are set up. If there are New Zealand interface and actually most of the capital that buys things in New Zealand's come through as foreign capital through the banks are all owned by foreigners, most of them. Unless you with a couple of smaller ones, which we should be supporting. But most of that capital is offshore comes through New Zealand entities. And that's a really hard one to squeeze down and track down often. And when you start with you stop. China Smith mentioned our productivity as a nation falling down the OECD letter. Another public holiday and I'm not arguing for a moment we shouldn't be celebrating and commemorating the life and times and works of a magnificent monarch, but do we need another public holiday? Do you politicians need to have the rest of the week off? Why aren't you setting this week? Well, I think for the points that you made and regarding to the queen of 70 years of the country. And look, I come from a Republican background from Ireland that I still respect the incredible commitment she has made to public service into her country into the Commonwealth. But where does it excuse you guys for taking the rest of the week off? I mean, one day bad enough, the rest of the week, really? Why? Well, I think that's a mark of commemoration that is happening through the Commonwealth that parliaments and systems are acknowledging the passing of the queen of 70 years and so you're asking the people to have one day off and you guys have the rest of the week off. It doesn't seem very fair.
Bloomberg Radio New York
"first farmers" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Bloomberg green report. Beekeepers around the world have been alarmed about massive honeybee deaths for years. The losses have now reached catastrophic proportions in parts of Canada and it's having an impact on the nation's blueberry market. Canada is the world's 7th largest exporter of blueberries and what is happening to growers is a warning to the world about what can happen when there is a breakdown in the pollination industry. One farmer in Quebec has hundreds of hives in his fields, but he needs more and can't get them The North American pollination industry has expanded in recent years as the number of wild bees declined. Beekeepers who struggled to profit from honey production started renting out hives to support an increase in fruit and vegetable acres, it's estimated the bees bring in $18 billion and added revenue to crop production each year, but it's estimated American beekeepers lose on average about 40% of their bees every year. Jeff Bellinger, Bloomberg radio. What is dedication? The thing that drives me every day is a day is very un we call them day to day for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge, and there's this huge responsibility and making sure that when he's no longer under my wing, that he's a good person. I think the advice I would give is you don't need to know all the answers. The craziest thing was believing that your dad knew everything. So as a dad, you felt like you had to know everything. You had to get everything right. It's okay to make mistakes. As long as it's coming from love, then, you know, it kind of starts to work itself out. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go. We work together, we did a good job. That's dedication. Find out more at fatherhood dot gov. Brought to you by the U.S. Department
Bloomberg Radio New York
"first farmers" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"This is your summer. That means 6 flags in the taste of an ice cold Coca-Cola. We're talking thrilling coasters, delicious burgers. Real moments together and this. Coke is summer refreshment when you need it most, so you can hop on another ride or race down a slide at the water park. 6 flags in Coca-Cola. Come make it yours. Visit 6 flags dot com slash Coke to save up to $20 on passes, plus daily tickets starting at 34 99. Beekeepers around the world have been alarmed about massive honeybee deaths for years. The losses have now reached catastrophic proportions in parts of Canada and it's having an impact on the nation's blueberry market. Canada is the world's 7th largest exporter of blueberries and what is happening to growers is a warning to the world about what can happen when there is a breakdown in the pollination industry. One farmer in Quebec has hundreds of hives in his fields, but he needs more and can't get them The North American hollow nation industry has expanded in recent years as the number of wild bees declined. Beekeepers who struggled to profit from honey production started renting out hives to support an increase in fruit and vegetable acres, it's estimated the bees bring in $18 billion and added revenue to crop production each year, but it's estimated American beekeepers lose on average about 40% of their bees every year. Jeff Bellinger, Bloomberg radio. Why do hedge funds and
TuneInPOC
"first farmers" Discussed on TuneInPOC
"If you think way, way back to our episodes on the first farmers, you might recall that the fertile Crescent was actually home to several, at least three, maybe more different groups of hunter gatherers around 10,000 years ago. These groups were deeply diverged from one another on a genetic and presumably linguistic level. But they seem to have shared the various innovations that define the invention of farming here. We barley legumes and a suite of domesticated animals. One of these groups was the natufians and the Levant. Another was that population of zagros farmers at ganj star who went east. And the third group lived in the north. Getting up toward present day Syria and turkey. This third group was the one that eventually expanded westward into Anatolia and eventually Europe. But not all of those neolithic farmers and Anatolia went west. Around 6000 BC give or take a few centuries, some of them seem to have headed north into the mountainous territory of the southern Caucasus. They brought their mud brick architecture and their package of domesticated cereals and animals with them. Perhaps domesticating wine grapes from a local ancestor and their new home. For a while, they coexisted with the communities of hunter gatherers already living in the southern Caucasus. Before long, these two highly divergent groups Anatolian farmers and Caucasus hunter gatherers, melded together and created a series of neolithic and copper age cultures in the deep valleys of the region. The spine of the Caucasus is almost impassable with only two major passes through it. One in the west and one in the east, but that apparently wasn't a barrier to this new group. They spread out north of the range as well into the hills extending north to the edges of the Eurasian steppes. In fact, most of the people living in the Caucasus today, especially in the southern Caucasus, are directly descended from this original mixture of populations 6000 or 7000 years ago. A series of distinct chalcolithic, copper age, cultures, rose on both sides of the Caucasus. We've talked before about the makeup people in the north Caucasus. They were metal workers and stock breeders with long distance trading connections that reached as far as Mesopotamia. They buried their dead and richly furnished burial mounds like those of their neighbors on the steppe. But they don't seem to have interbred much with the early step groups who bordered them like the Hawaiians people. The makeup people lived mostly in the northwestern part of the Caucasus in the foothills overlooking the steps. The southern Caucasus was home to its own series of cultures. The southernmost of which was tied directly into the developing city states of Mesopotamia like Uruk. It was the southern slopes of the Caucasus that became the heartland of the region's major culture of the early Bronze Age. The two major rivers of the southern Caucasus, the kura and Iraqis, rise in what's now eastern turkey and flow east before joining up and draining into the Caspian Sea together. This series of river valleys became the core of a new culture, known as the kura araxes or transcaucasian culture. This was an expansive culture that moved outward from its homeland in all directions. At its peak it stretched well north of the peaks of the Caucasus to the border of the eraser step, west to central Anatolia, south into the Levant, along the Mediterranean coast, and east into northwestern Iran. That's a really, really big area. What's even more striking about the kura araxes culture is that it doesn't look like the material remains of an empire or an invading elite or even a bunch of far flung traders. It's a sharp contrast with the cultural groups that bordered it, like the makeup people in the north Caucasus, the yamnaya and their successors and the steppe, and the urban Uruk civilization and Mesopotamia to the south. All of those were extremely hierarchical society, albeit in much different ways. The kura araxes people by contrast were more humble folk. Yet their way of life was extremely successful and long-lasting. At its core was a set of fundamental elements, a cultural package, a particular division of household space that emphasized the hearth, a distinctive hand made pottery with black and red black burnished surfaces, ceramic animal figurines, with horns, and a specific but limited set of metal and stone tools. There could be lots of variations from region to region, houses might be shaped differently, the way the pottery was decorated could vary and so on. But these basic elements were shared across time and space..
TuneInPOC
"first farmers" Discussed on TuneInPOC
"If you think way, way back to our episodes on the first farmers, you might recall that the fertile Crescent was actually home to several, at least three, maybe more different groups of hunter gatherers around 10,000 years ago. These groups were deeply diverged from one another on a genetic and presumably linguistic level. But they seem to have shared the various innovations that define the invention of farming here. We barley legumes and a suite of domesticated animals. One of these groups was the natufians and the Levant. Another was that population of zagros farmers at ganj star who went east. And the third group lived in the north. Getting up toward present day Syria and turkey. This third group was the one that eventually expanded westward into Anatolia and eventually Europe. But not all of those neolithic farmers and Anatolia went west. Around 6000 BC give or take a few centuries, some of them seem to have headed north into the mountainous territory of the southern Caucasus. They brought their mud brick architecture and their package of domesticated cereals and animals with them. Perhaps domesticating wine grapes from a local ancestor and their new home. For a while, they coexisted with the communities of hunter gatherers already living in the southern Caucasus. Before long, these two highly divergent groups Anatolian farmers and Caucasus hunter gatherers, melded together and created a series of neolithic and copper age cultures in the deep valleys of the region. The spine of the Caucasus is almost impassable with only two major passes through it. One in the west and one in the east, but that apparently wasn't a barrier to this new group. They spread out north of the range as well into the hills extending north to the edges of the Eurasian steppes. In fact, most of the people living in the Caucasus today, especially in the southern Caucasus, are directly descended from this original mixture of populations 6000 or 7000 years ago. A series of distinct chalcolithic, copper age, cultures, rose on both sides of the Caucasus. We've talked before about the makeup people in the north Caucasus. They were metal workers and stock breeders with long distance trading connections that reached as far as Mesopotamia. They buried their dead and richly furnished burial mounds like those of their neighbors on the steppe. But they don't seem to have interbred much with the early step groups who bordered them like the Hawaiians people. The makeup people lived mostly in the northwestern part of the Caucasus in the foothills overlooking the steps. The southern Caucasus was home to its own series of cultures. The southernmost of which was tied directly into the developing city states of Mesopotamia like Uruk. It was the southern slopes of the Caucasus that became the heartland of the region's major culture of the early Bronze Age. The two major rivers of the southern Caucasus, the kura and Iraqis, rise in what's now eastern turkey and flow east before joining up and draining into the Caspian Sea together. This series of river valleys became the core of a new culture, known as the kura araxes or transcaucasian culture. This was an expansive culture that moved outward from its homeland in all directions. At its peak it stretched well north of the peaks of the Caucasus to the border of the eraser step, west to central Anatolia, south into the Levant, along the Mediterranean coast, and east into northwestern Iran. That's a really, really big area. What's even more striking about the kura araxes culture is that it doesn't look like the material remains of an empire or an invading elite or even a bunch of far flung traders. It's a sharp contrast with the cultural groups that bordered it, like the makeup people in the north Caucasus, the yamnaya and their successors and the steppe, and the urban Uruk civilization and Mesopotamia to the south. All of those were extremely hierarchical society, albeit in much different ways. The kura araxes people by contrast were more humble folk. Yet their way of life was extremely successful and long-lasting. At its core was a set of fundamental elements, a cultural package, a particular division of household space that emphasized the hearth, a distinctive hand made pottery with black and red black burnished surfaces, ceramic animal figurines, with horns, and a specific but limited set of metal and stone tools. There could be lots of variations from region to region, houses might be shaped differently, the way the pottery was decorated could vary and so on. But these basic elements were shared across time and space..
My First Million
"first farmers" Discussed on My First Million
"At the atomic level so companies are pushed out and people are pushed out of atomic. And there's not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever because it's dangerous to do that and then it is. Isn't it nine months and three hundred thousand dollars. Is that right. Two hundred fifty thousand or something so we have multiple stages of investment the first check. That will right kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework is around a quarter million dollars but it could range from one hundred thousand four hundred thousand and then if that goes well we can write a check. That's usually two million dollars but again it could be one to four million dollars and then from there we can actually write a check. That could be three to eight million dollars that sometimes do with other. Vc's sometimes we do on our own kind of depends on the circumstances depends on the needs of the company and what we need to get to the next set of milestones. But that's kind of how it works. Now that's been evolving over our funds and our first fund. It was smaller so we obviously only did like the early rounds. Which is what. Sean is describing. And then as it's gotten bigger we were able to get the company's further which is why we can keep themself longer and now when they come out they usually have raised. These really big routes. Did you when you when you were starting this. How much of your own money did you put up to do this. And you like all right. I made this much money. I'm willing to lose a million dollars over the next two years to see if i can make this work. Yeah good question. So my general philosophy with things as you shouldn't sell what you wouldn't also by so i wanted to prove to myself that this would work before raising outside capital so the first year of atomic i did it with my own capital. Which was roughly on the order of what you described. And then once i was convinced. Okay i think this is working. I think we can pull this off. I think this model is gonna work. Then we raised our first fund and our first fund was roughly. The i i part of the first farmers..
The Doomer Bloomer Podcast
"first farmers" Discussed on The Doomer Bloomer Podcast
"A subtle harmony to everyone you come into contact with end. Most of them will probably have absolutely no idea that happened and they never will know. But it's not meant meant to be a conscious thing and if you do that day after day after day after day after day year year creek. Positive ripples on onto the planet that are untraceable. You know they're going so far spread That who knows what's going to happen and from there you know everyone will come up with their practical way to serve but it but it all starts with that you know it all starts with that inward stuff first farmers market by the way. That's what i thinking. When i was trying to figure out the tents and stuff it's like the modern day farmers market so that that is my vice. Yeah i mean the thing that i that i kind of realized is that like we don't have those physical markets as much as we used to. You know i. I think something that were met with something that we're missing there. Yeah absolutely Where can listeners connect with you online. Either your social handles or online website. The.
Zero Credit(s)
"first farmers" Discussed on Zero Credit(s)
"Think the gadsden lewinsky refers to this as the second form of godzilla. I form of godzilla is the one that lives in the ocean that we never say i. Yeah i suppose so. I didn't i. I wanted to do some research but as i was reading. These thoughts are no longer my own now. They're they're supplied by people who read deeper into this. I didn't want to taint my takes. You know i got so yeah. I don't know what the first farmers but they referred to this as the seconds and you're saying this form was might have been inspired by godzillas sun. It's conjecture the it's the idea that people generally found it's constantly like open round is to be concerning so maybe that's i don't know it's conjecture I i was a fan of it because One of the coolest things you can do something that's been around for sixty years change it. Yeah i mean. It's this is without a doubt the bravest thing to do to godzilla Which is make a version of godzilla those weird week soft and somehow much scary. Godzilla is typically. This is worse. Godzilla in every way would lose a fight to any good godzilla. But it's still scarier than the great majority of versions of godzilla. I appreciate the lack of intelligence in its is Guts like the beady eyes of god's hill has always liked their to intelligence. It's like washing something with malice. It's is when that's done correctly but it is a refreshing thing like this is just dominate creature. And i think that there's a lot to maybe be said about how much one could read into malice. Existing in this interpretation of godzilla. Because of course the reason this godzilla exists is for a nuclear waste being dumped off the coast of japan which is heavily implied that the us did that by the way. Oh okay. I just think it's heavily implied because once they start talking about the us senate an envoy. The us says if you go public with this we're not going to assist you in a union unilateral effort against godzilla. Think it's pretty heavily implied that the the toxic waste is america's fault but. That's kind of a footnote. I guess it's also heavily implied that the the the professor who goes missing at the beginning of the film is the reason why godzilla comes to shore. I don't think that that's extensively. Explored that gorham ocoee which i think is his name. Yeah i was out on a pleasure craft. I don't think we explorer win. And how he could have made godzilla happened. Maybe i missed that in the viewings of the movie but it is implied that somehow he is responsible for god zillah coming ashore and is may by extension Enacting his wrath on japan ram or or any country that uses nuclear weapons or nuclear energy Soldano so like this character. He figured out basically everything about godzilla..
The Military Veteran Dad Podcast
"first farmers" Discussed on The Military Veteran Dad Podcast
"Yeah i'm laying there on the ground over in the festival area after the race and just being kind of completely spent at that point i had been one of the top things done my life. I mean race wise And and but i remember fallen in love with it at the same time like that feeling like that. I just exhausted myself and and had really push myself to the limit for where i was at that point. Not only just physically but mentally as well. I mean you go through that race and there's all there's times where i was like. Why am i doing this. Why are you just hanging up this. Walk the rest of the way or something like that her. You know so so i i kinda fell in love with it and then i started doing more and more of those spar races racist. I started kind of travel around local Races that were around. And i found myself losing weight by training and getting better and better physical shape and then i started meeting. People out of these races at that has similar mindsets. You meet a lot of veterans. That do these kind of races. And you know what i started to find was not that not only was i kind of given the the the the physical side of me a therapy needed but also getting the the the mental relationships with other people that brotherhood and sisterhood. That kind of missing Likely craving for my time in the military i was finding like minded people that had goals and dreams in or were doing the same thing i was doing out there these races and so he started developing friendships and started beyond with a practice. What we talked about earlier just as conversations and talking to people. And then. And then i i remember by the end of that year of two thousand seventeen was that first farmers and december of that year..
MyTalk 107.1
"first farmers" Discussed on MyTalk 107.1
"The craft beer industry situation. What's happening in the meat to movement and I did want to wrap something up because there is an important point that I think that we ran out of time on Is that in this is you know this brand is has basically said that this this kind of things, you know it bloomed. It went on to her instagram stories, and it just took over and she sort of spending all of her time managing all these stories and posting them. Because she's saying I'm just here to share them because they're giving them to me. But she has also been noted from other people that they're anonymous. And so they're not vetted. And so she has been threatened with lawsuits from certain people in certain breweries. And the truth of the matter is is that this is the weird part of all of this is that you're saying you want people to speak up and we do want them to speak up, but we want them to say, Stop it in the moment and But this is maybe the way of them speaking up that they're starting with, But it's not. It's hard because it's there are legal ramifications of making these kind of accusations and And as a journalist, someone who is like, you know, I'm there are libels. There are things that like this, you know, brand she could be sued for this and all she's doing is actually re posting. She's not making the story. But there are some laws. There's a really interesting article saying that it's unlikely that she's going to get sued. But there are like things that if you post something, and you attach a comment, or you may even put a sticker on it, then that becomes Content that you have created, and so then you are liable like there's all sorts of things that are are a part of this. And let's focus on what we want to come out of it. There's a lot of demand for apology. Demanding apologies doesn't make a company better you demanding something from them or not, It's not hearing the apology or that's a non apology. Let's just I missed me totally honest here. Apologies aren't what make the industry's better right Actions make the industry better. So if you're going to be all weird about Michael, that wasn't really an apology. Just what do you put your efforts where it counts. Put your efforts towards Are you gonna buy their beer? Aren't you? Do you feel that their culture's changed or isn't it? Ask them? What are you doing to change your culture? I appreciate their open to this discussion. Just an apology is as performative and anything else. It's international Women's Day is what it is. It's like it's like those environments that it's pink beer. That's what she's saying. She doesn't want pink here. She's only to tell his want you to tell the world about things just do better. Just do it. Do the thing make more women Pick up when you're in an environment where you see this. Tell the people. It's not okay. Ask them. What are you doing? Do you have an employee policy? Do you have any HR department? These are the things that are going to matter and not your stupid apology Need on social media. Right? So there you go. Sorry. It's an interesting read. Moving on. I got all fired up about that one E demanding apology makes me mad. Well, I It's an act, but it's also a thing of it. Someone else trying to help I get the idea of it, though The idea is that they want to make the noise so that change can come because change comes when more people are indicted in it, and it comes from noise. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You know what does not come from change? Rhubarb, rhubarb. Rhubarb comes from the same thing forever and ever. This is still don't love it. Okay, but see, I I'm just going around the world planting rhubarb. Everywhere I go. I do love it. I today is Cabin weekend first time up. Getting ready to head up to the garden, hoping my rhubarb up there is going. It'll be small because I planted it last year, but you brought me some rhubarb. This is just Is, I think about like my cabin cookbook that I'm working on. And I think about just cabin season like rhubarb is to start it is it is the first farmers market cry ships and then boom herbs and we have rhubarb is unique to the north. So it also screams like Minnesota to me. I put a recipe up on my block for rhubarb custard bars. Bars and just like did you make somebody's got if I would've been on my game? I should've made bars this weekend, but I'm not on my game. Yeah, I know because you're moving. That's so hard. My We're having a baby shower. There's all sorts of stuff so anyway, forget, but like immediately when you said that, as a Minnesota woman I was like, Oh, I should have. I should have made them And now I'm like the guilt. Anyway, Go ahead, please. Um the other thing that is real easy to make with rhubarb because some people just don't like it. It's tough. It's start. It's not exactly like a week. Well, it looks like it's going to be this like sweet, yummy thing. And then it's like, yes. You know, it needs about two cups of sugar for anything you make. And I think that I think, actually, I like it more hurt. I think I like it as tart. But the problem is everything I've ever had. It's so overly sweetened to battle the tart that it on Lee ever taste like, You know, Sugar like jam? Yeah. It is really easy to just cut your rhubarb into like half inch pieces. Put it in a saucepan with a little bit of water. Some sugar as much sugar radio want on, you just cook it down and you can make like a rough jam. They call that that you can spread on toast or whatever..
Real Food Real People
"first farmers" Discussed on Real Food Real People
"For <Speech_Music_Male> <Silence> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Female> <Speech_Male> <Advertisement> <Speech_Female> <Laughter> the farmer. <Silence> Packet <SpeakerChange> big <Speech_Music_Male> now <Speech_Music_Female> <Speech_Male> <Advertisement> just <Silence> to think dumb woman. <Silence> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Male> The money <Speech_Music_Male> was away fast. <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> I don't care it's <Silence> a big jet was more <Speech_Male> check. <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> What about your <Silence> future. <Speech_Male> Yeah <Speech_Male> and then if the farm <Speech_Male> has to <Speech_Male> pale those people <Silence> and can't afford it <Speech_Male> and they have <Speech_Male> to face a <Speech_Male> situation like you did <Speech_Male> with your restaurant <Speech_Male> then what happens <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> to <Speech_Male> those people's jobs. <Speech_Female> Yeah <Speech_Female> i tried to explain. <Speech_Female> Okay <Speech_Male> you have a like <Speech_Male> big check right <Speech_Male> now in excited <Speech_Male> to cover like twenty <Speech_Male> five thousand <Speech_Female> maybe <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Female> but <Speech_Music_Female> <Laughter> that far <Speech_Music_Female> more <Silence> broke <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> so what about <Speech_Male> the next five years <Speech_Male> later for <Speech_Female> your family. Don't <Speech_Female> talk about the firmer. <Speech_Male> Are you say <Speech_Female> the final cars <Speech_Female> already. <Speech_Female> Some farmers <Speech_Male> guzzler like my dad. <Speech_Male> My dad working <Silence> so hard <Speech_Male> <Silence> when his junk <Laughter> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Female> and he has over <Speech_Female> rated for <Speech_Male> me is like <Speech_Male> and the <Speech_Male> of these days <Silence> and his life <Speech_Male> so <Speech_Male> about <Speech_Male> me not for my dad <Speech_Male> so <Speech_Female> that the workers <Speech_Male> need to worry about <Speech_Male> the workers for <Speech_Male> family enough of the <Speech_Male> farmer the <Speech_Male> farmer has <Silence> <Speech_Male> like <Speech_Male> everything done <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> for the rest <Speech_Male> of his life <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Male> but <SpeakerChange> what about <Speech_Male> the workers world <Speech_Male> the farmer solely like <Speech_Male> one firmer <Silence> and <Speech_Music_Male> ten <Speech_Male> families <Speech_Male> survive for <Speech_Male> one farmer <Speech_Male> because you can <Speech_Male> work <Speech_Male> job for ten <Speech_Male> families <Speech_Male> so when you broke <Speech_Male> you prop <Speech_Male> ju ju <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Female> But ten families <Silence> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> it's affected <Silence> <Speech_Music_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> ten more families. <Speech_Male> What do you think is <Speech_Music_Male> going to happen. <Silence> <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> Just <Speech_Female> in case that thing <Silence> like <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> it's like passing <Speech_Music_Male> the low <Silence> <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> it's sad. I <Speech_Male> think it's the <Speech_Male> bolt sizes. It's <Speech_Female> sad <Speech_Female> sad for the farmers <Speech_Female> and south <Silence> of the workers <Speech_Male> because <Speech_Male> so much <Speech_Male> workers. The families <Speech_Male> like broke <Speech_Male> down. Close the business <Speech_Male> so much <Silence> cruises to move <Speech_Male> <Silence> now places <Speech_Male> <Speech_Music_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> that's to say <Speech_Male> i think it's like <Speech_Male> sat <Speech_Male> and <Speech_Male> nothing <Speech_Male> happened <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> well. <Speech_Male> Let's hope that <Speech_Male> doesn't happen <Speech_Male> that way. <Speech_Male> I think <Speech_Male> is is what we all <Speech_Male> need. Hope for <Speech_Male> and that people <Silence> would listen to. <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> The <SpeakerChange> people affected <Speech_Male> farmers. <Speech_Male> The workers <Silence> <Speech_Male> is that <Speech_Male> that's why we need. <Speech_Male> People need to <Speech_Male> be listening <SpeakerChange> to each other <Speech_Male> and respecting. Each other <Speech_Male> is very <Speech_Male> sad for both <Speech_Male> sizes <Silence> <Speech_Female> about four. <Speech_Female> I think more <Speech_Male> for the workers <Speech_Male> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Male> because <Speech_Male> like one <Speech_Male> farmer <Speech_Male> ten families <Speech_Male> depends for one firm <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> so families. <Speech_Male> The families <Speech_Male> think <SpeakerChange> about in <Speech_Male> the this for the workers. <Speech_Male> Yeah <Speech_Male> so one farmer me <Speech_Male> lose farm. <Speech_Male> Yeah but ten <Speech_Male> <Speech_Male> or more. <Speech_Male> Sometimes <Speech_Male> many more may <Speech_Male> lose their jobs <Speech_Male> so many <Speech_Male> more families. <Silence> <SpeakerChange> <Speech_Music_Male> That's <Speech_Music_Male>
KHVH 830AM
"first farmers" Discussed on KHVH 830AM
"In the morning. It is sustaining Hawaii presented by their brought to you by Bear Hawaii and we are delighted that you're on board with us sustaining Hawaii educating sharing information about Well, arguably the most important thing being able to sustain ourselves here in Hawaii. Wanna thank Denise Yamaguchi for joining us, and it is a pleasure to welcome on board. Our next guest. Alan Gottlieb is manager of the park in Kenia, along with Bonnie. But, Alan, I want to thank you for joining us and Aloha. Lot. Thank you for having me this morning on this beautiful, rainy day. Oh, thank goodness. Could we take some of the rain and make sure my we get some two that really marry in the Big island are dry. They say, uh this morning on the news. They say it's heading that way. So hopefully it is really need it. Absolutely. Hey, First of all, Alan, thank you for joining us. Would you mind sharing a little bit about yourself, please? Okay, so it's It's not just me and Bonnie Bonnie's My daughter. It's our company. It's were called Second City property management, and we have kind of a unique job. We manage agricultural, property and water systems. We do some small drinking water systems, too, But it's usually associated with those other jobs that we have. It was the catalyst for you to become involved in this if I dare say industry Wow, it's it's you have to go back quite a while. But basically when, when all who sugar was transitioning out of sugar and Campbell, a state Now. The James Campbell company, of course, took back that land that they released into a while. Who? Sugar? We, my partner and I, uh, hey since passed on, but He had worked with or who sugar and he had worked previously with Campbell, and basically they were looking for a company to do what we exactly what we were doing it. They were refurbishing that property for some other agricultural tenants. Um and Names such as the loon farms or largesse farms. That's who works on this particular property in ever who farms that property and there's a several other smaller farmers out there. And they needed someone to run the water systems for them and make sure the farmers got water, and that's what we started. How we started doing that about 20 years ago. I have to imagine it would be kind of like herding cats. With the hope that type of management. There's so many variables, so many situations that we don't necessarily have control over but control in our responses. So saying that can you tell us a little bit about your role in managing Thea parking Kenia? Right. Okay, so just just back onto your comments as far as hurting cats and things we can't control. Um you know, it's the farmers really, that have that challenge to him. You know, with with the weather and things like that that tests and so they're dealing with that every single day. The challenges are insurmountable. Sometimes in the agricultural industry, our job is easy compared to theirs. But you know in ever, for instance, um, it's um you know you were Campbell philosophy was that they had 1000 acres, and they got two or three tenants on him, And it's a lot less like hurting cats in the case like that, So now we get to the oId Foundation AG bark, and that could be like hurting cats. Because Denise mentioned there's You know, there's over 20 small farmers, each with five acres, and that's something that that you know. A lot of large landowners want to stay away from. They don't want to hurt cats. Um, that's where we come in. Uh, Andre, But frankly, I mean, why I foundation has been a pleasure. These are Are industrious, hardworking farmers that You know? We just We've just had a fantastic success working with these folks and and helping them be successful. Would you do us a favor? Because some folks styled in, we could use some perspective with small farmers. Five acres of plot of five acres. Can you give us a perspective on linear miles yards of how we can comprehend that size of land? Rhoda literally compared to Ah. A new anchor is is about 44,000 Square feet, right? So, um I don't know how How many acres that lives there Football field kind of year kind of thing, like five Blaisdell Arena campus, pleased L campus or something like that. I would get believe they'll campus with the parking Everything is hard to tell. But I mean, just it's probably something like 15 acres with parking and old thing from corner to corner there, but I may be way off too. No, that's okay. I could look at it in the field, but, yeah, no. I mean, five acres is a nice chunk of land. Um Small farmers and he's mentioned there is this some one farmer? At least that has one acre and and a couple have, you know a couple of three acres, but Um There's some folks like Jason coming up. Who's got close to 30 Acres now in the I park and In addition, other lives that he's picked up. We would like to learn more. Absolutely. And Alan, can you do us a favor? How could we reach out to you? And perhaps either website phone. Best way that we can connect with you folks. Um, probably we don't wail a low we We have a very limited number of clients because we're very specialized. We we go by word of mouth. I mean way used to where we are. Four number was listed in the phone book, a second city property management. I used to get calls about renting condos in in a couple A and things like that, so we eventually took her. Listing out of the phone book type of thing or and consider changing the name but second city agricultural management, the initials for that a scam, so I thought that wouldn't be a real good idea. But but you could. Anyone could reach us through Denise and she gave contact information and fires for the act Foundation. Excellent. Excellent. What we're gonna do is I have a hard break coming up, but I'd like for you to join me for the first part of the next segment. Because you've been managing, uh, the park for just about over a year, and what I'd like to do is get your perspective to on what's transpired in that year. And this Is sustaining away. He brought to you by bear and our friend Ellen got Lee will be returning with us, and then we'll connect with Jason brand. You don't want to miss out. Our conversation with Jason. That is straight ahead once again, sustaining high brought to you by bear. Thank you for joining us, and it is 9 30..
The Entwistle Podcast
"first farmers" Discussed on The Entwistle Podcast
"My code end hyphen ten. You can get ten percent off a checkout anything hyphen ten. Yep exactly i know beef and be in the description below as well okay. You have any of their clothes. I'm going to buy so much. I use your own code with my money. Exactly yeah smart about about sponsors. Although i did you walk up on so big kind of listening gila also is just. Let me know. Because i i asked him earlier but i think i think only athletes get hutus because sponsor athletes and stuff. I i'm honestly. Don't i don't really comment an athlete. I think is an insult to call me an athlete. So off the tee shirt. Yeah so like how did they discover you. Well they're a friend of a friend's company so you know how you have like like one farmer your really close friends with so shall jasmine. She's been on the podcasts multiple times anyways she is good mates for this guy and when calicoes tied. I shared something to kind of get going. Because you know jasmine's really really fault to help me my podcast. So you think you. And then i got into kyle america to a point where you don't always share posts. Just egging him on keeping them in the right in the right head space with stuff and it went quiet for a while because we had a bit of a sponsorship you think going first and then all went by and i can't decided i wanted to volunteer on the sponsors and then i'm just i thought to myself why. Why am i doing this. Their local local brand. I wonder how they can help me out. So why ditching someone back. So that's that's you know. What don i haven't asked you about your your tape talk antics because i must've a couple times sister just it's just a well. Yes because we're friends on tiktok. Not too broad guys. I'm i'm photos later on..
WTMJ 620
"first farmers" Discussed on WTMJ 620
"Monfort guy paying tribute he was Dad's ethic. Years. Alex Dick Monfort scramble. Warren started cattle ranching with the few cattle in Greeley, Colorado, in groups of 30,000 cattle, the largest cattle feeder in the world at the time. Dick stat. Kenny kicked it up a notch, pioneering the vertical integration off the whole industry. He risked everything they had by building an operation. That's it its very own slaughtering, processing and distributing which all used to be done by different middlemen. He was successful building the first quote, complete meat company and saved US consumers money by cutting out all these middlemen. It was a serious business. But that didn't mean that they couldn't have some fun along the way. Fat cattle feeders from Iowa would drive out this way, and they go to Estes Park, which was a great place to go in the summer, right? One farmer. One time came through there and looking at the deal and said, Oh, my God, This thing's huge. This is unbelievable, and he asked a guy by the name of Tito, who worked at the feedlot. Sort of took care of my grandfather. He said. How many people work here and Tito quickly set about half of them? These month for guys are characters, but they sure are ethical. Nixon because of runaway inflation had put a price freeze, But the price freeze was on the in product. It wasn't on the cattle. The problem in the beef industry is the raw material was about 70% of your cost, and so by freezing the back end or the meat prices the front end. The cattle prices went way up because cattle feeders didn't want to have their profits squeezed and they can hold onto their cattle until the price freeze was over. The meat Packers had to pay them a lot more to get any of their cattle, which eliminated the Packers profits and threatened to turn their business into daily losses. People started saying, You know there's.
KOA 850 AM
"first farmers" Discussed on KOA 850 AM
"Dick Monfort. Grampa Warren started cattle ranching with the few cattle in Greeley, Colorado. In groups of 30,000 cattle, the largest cattle feeder in the world. At the time Index tag, Kenny kicked it up a notch, pioneering the vertical integration off the whole industry. He risked everything they had by building an operation. That's it its very own slaughtering, processing and distributing which all used to be done by different middlemen. He was successful building the first quote, complete meat company and saved US consumers money by cutting out all these middlemen. It was a serious business, but that didn't mean that they couldn't have some fun. Along the way fact cattle feeders from Maya what would drive out this way, and they go to Estes Park, which was a great place to go in the summer, right? One farmer. One time came through there and Looking at the deal and said, Oh, my God, This thing's huge. This is unbelievable, and he asked a guy by the name of Tito, who worked at the feedlot sort of took care of my grandfather, he said. How many people work here and Tito quickly set about half of them. Thies Montford guys are characters, but they sure are ethical. Nixon because of runaway inflation had put a price freeze. But the price freeze was on the in product. It wasn't on the cattle. Problem in in the beef industry is the rob material is about 70% of your cost, and so by freezing the back end or the meat prices the front end, the cattle prices went way up. Because cattle feeders didn't want to have their profits squeezed and they can hold onto their cattle until the price freeze was over. So the meat packers had to pay them a lot more to get any of their cattle, which eliminated the Packers profits and threatened to turn their business in the daily losses. People start saying, You know there's gonna be a shortage of me because they can't produce it at this level. Well, there wasn't really any shortage of me. But the people were going in and grabbing it in fear.