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Sept. 6, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
32:27
Death of US Dollar to cause Bitcoin All Time High? w/ Mike Adams of Brighteon | BC Interviews
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I'm Ashton Addison from Block West Capital for Investment Pitch Media and today on the Crypto Coin Show with Mike Adams, the founder of Bredion.com and Decentralized TV. Mike, welcome to the show.
It is such a pleasure to have you on.
Well, thank you, Ashton.
It's an honor to be here.
I appreciate the invite.
Yeah, I've been a big fan of yours and following your news network for many years now, Brighteon, Natural News, Liberty.
And it's exciting to see that you're also working on Decentralized TV, as we know we've been big fans of the blockchain and cryptocurrency side.
I know you have a long history on the Brighteon side, and Decentralized TV is a little bit newer.
I'd love to give Give you a chance to talk about the story of all this new stuff and crypto is sort of there.
It's very related to what you're talking about and how that led to starting a decentralized TV network.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And just as a little bit of background, I experimented with Bitcoin early on.
I had extra solar energy at one of my offices in Tucson, Arizona.
And so since I had extra kilowatt hours, I bought some ant miners.
This was many years ago, and I was mining Bitcoin and turning sunlight into Bitcoin.
And then I sold the Bitcoin for gold.
Sunlight into gold, which I thought was pretty cool.
And, of course, if I had held on to the Bitcoin, it would have been worth more than the gold at that time, but that's just history.
I realize, especially with the debanking that's been going on recently, and we saw that in Canada, you know, with the trucker convoy, and then we've seen that in the United States.
I've interviewed people like Dr.
Joseph Mercola, who has been debanked by JPMorgan Chase.
Well, his staff and their family members were debanked, and we've seen a lot of viewpoint discrimination in the banking industry.
And those things together really led me to understand that the fiat currency banking system is simply not honest, not reliable.
I already knew that the Federal Reserve was a rigged monetary system, because I've been following Ron Paul for decades, so I already knew all that.
With the debanking that's happening, it became really urgent in my mind to learn and then help teach decentralization of currency and finance and money.
And that's what led me to the launch of Decentralize.TV, which is the new show.
We've filmed, I think, 14 episodes so far, and that's going pretty well.
And we're just trying to spread the gospel on...
I'm a fan of privacy crypto in particular, but why crypto is an honest ledger, whereas the fiat currency banking system is a dishonest rigged ledger, where you will never get ahead in that system.
That's my take.
Wow.
That's amazing to hear that you're actually solar mining Bitcoin, and that's probably one of the best ways to acquire it in a non-KYC method.
Oh yeah, exactly.
There's no KYC. There's solar panels and the desert sun.
That's amazing.
And yes, speaking of the trucker convoy and the debanking, I feel like Bitcoin is a great alternative to holding your own assets.
Spending them is another thing that is a little bit harder than holding them at the moment.
People still need to sort of live, buy your coffee or buy food to survive.
There are definitely people that are accepting Bitcoin, but obviously not as much as fiat currencies, at least in North America at the moment.
Well, yeah, and I think that's going to change in favor of Bitcoin.
So, in fact, some of the people I've interviewed that live through hyperinflation in Venezuela, for example, you know, there was a point where it was just the utility of being able to have a digital coin that worked and it didn't lose value every 12 hours to where you had some kind of price stability.
You know, that had intrinsic value itself.
And by the way, also as another note, It took me many years to understand the intrinsic value in Bitcoin or Monero or other coins.
I used to think that, oh, they're backed by nothing and therefore how could they have any value?
But when you understand the utility, they're backed by the ability to take self-custody, the ability to engage in borderless transactions, the ability...
To send money or retrieve money anytime to anyone you want anywhere in the world, usually in a matter of just a few minutes, that has value by itself.
And that value cannot be matched by the fiat currency banking system.
And the one thing we saw in, I believe, March of last year, because of the war situation in Ukraine, we saw the West weaponize the SWIFT system in order to debank Russia from the international financial settlement system, which is SWIFT. I think that will go down in history as the worst financial mistake in the history of our world.
In fact, today, by the way, BRICS nations are meeting right now to talk about the new settlement currency that will...
It will dethrone the dollar as the global reserve currency.
I mean, Jim Rickards calls this the biggest financial announcement in 50 years, and that's happening right now.
So the dollar, in my opinion, the dollar is doomed ultimately.
But when the dollar fails and the banks fail, Bitcoin will still work.
Bitcoin will outlast the U.S. dollar.
That's my prediction on your show today.
When the dollar is dead, Bitcoin will still be here and it will still be functioning.
Amazing.
And I think that's a pretty good prediction.
And you mentioned there Argentina.
I saw that recently when, you know, Bitcoin was just at $30,000 just now, it reached new all-time highs versus the Argentinian peso.
So a lot of these Latin American countries, Central American countries, they're really noticing, like, hey, you know, We're experiencing hyperinflation.
This is actually a huge value.
The world isn't just the United States.
There's a lot of other countries in the world that can benefit from Bitcoin.
I went to El Salvador myself during the Bitcoin conference, during the announcement from the president.
They've experienced double-digit GDP growth, happiness of the citizens, and their wealth seems to be preserved.
It seems to be working for them.
It looks like that could be a domino effect for You make a point that the abundance of a nation and the freedom of the people who live in that nation has to be rooted on honest money.
And we know that the Bitcoin ledger is an honest ledger in the sense that no one can print, you know, no government in particular can just print trillions of new Bitcoins.
If they could, Bitcoin would be worth zero.
Well, they can print trillions of new dollars.
And even though the global dollar supply, you know, M2 money supply in particular is very large, it is not unlimited.
And that means that printing trillions of dollars will bring the dollar to zero, especially as it's abandoned by at least 100 other nations around the world in what's called Operation Sandman.
Starting with Saudi Arabia, by the way, the Saudis are done with the dollar.
They're going to sell oil in all kinds of other currencies, the rupee, the yuan, the ruble, you name it.
They don't need to demand dollars anymore.
We're about to see in the United States, although it'll be a little slower than what you mentioned in Argentina or Venezuela, but we are going to see rapid debasement of the dollar, which means rapid hyperinflation eventually in consumer products.
And by the way, a lot of younger people today, Gen Z people, they're putting out TikTok videos about how, oh, I can't afford to eat, I can't afford to pay rent, I can't afford to live.
And I hope that we can educate those people.
The reason you can't afford to do any of those things is because of the dishonest ledger known as the Dollar Central Bank Federal Reserve System.
If we had honest money, you would be able to afford to live.
And guess what?
There's an alternative, and it's called cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin's number one, and that's an honest ledger.
And if we had our economy running in Bitcoin, you wouldn't be broke.
That would be super cool.
And what you mentioned there a few minutes ago about how, for example, it took you and many people a while to sort of understand the true intrinsic value of Bitcoin because from an educated economist perspective, a new asset class, they say, well, you can't compare it to a fiat currency saying, well, it's backed by this and this.
The fact that the supply is finite at $21 million, and although it's divisible so that everybody in the world could own a piece, unlike the American dollar where they're just printing billions of dollars per day, yeah, I feel like this inflation, who knows if the numbers are actually true or not, on what they're saying the inflation actually is, it's hard to measure.
But I think we could see a new all-time high for Bitcoin versus the U.S. dollar as well.
Oh, yeah, I have no doubt that that can absolutely be the case.
But let me address this issue of currencies being backed by things.
And again, it took me a while to come around to this.
But I used to think that currencies had to be backed by something, which means, in my mind, redeemable for those things.
So I used to ask, when I was very critical of a lot of the hype in crypto, I used to ask, well, can you trade the crypto for anything like gold or silver?
What I now understand, and again, it took me some time to realize this, is that if you have, suppose you have a crypto backed by gold.
Well, the gold is stored somewhere.
It's stored in a centralized location.
Which means it's not decentralized.
Which means that if some government can come along and seize that vault, no matter where it is, maybe it's in Singapore, maybe it's in London, maybe it's in Texas.
But if it's centrally controlled, then you don't have, you haven't achieved decentralization.
And so I would rather use a cryptocurrency that is not tied to something possibly being confiscated physically by some rogue government somewhere in the world that gets desperate and needs to back up its own failing currency and then decides, oh, let's go for the gold.
You know, with the military or something, which has happened, obviously, throughout history.
So now that I understand it, I realize I don't want a cryptocurrency backed by anything physical in the 3D world.
What I want it backed by is its utility, its usefulness.
I'm also a fan of privacy coins, you know, like Monero, for example.
I love being able to donate money to people.
I was just donating money like three days ago, and I use Monero for that.
Why?
I don't want to leave a trace, right?
I just want to send it.
I don't want I don't want to flag anything.
I don't want people asking questions.
I don't want anybody to know.
I sent money to somebody who's doing great work and needed some funds.
Boom.
Monero, I tell them.
Now, I tell people, you know, we donated half a million dollars a few months ago.
I tell people, if you want a donation, you go set up crypto, because that's the only way I'm doing it from here forward.
I'm not sending checks.
I'm not using banks.
That system doesn't work.
It fails, it fails, it fails.
I'm only making donations in crypto from here forward, period.
That's my rule.
That's amazing.
And yeah, just like what would happen with the truckers in Canada, I know people personally, being from Canada, that donated $20 or $30 and all of a sudden they had issues with their bank accounts like Frozen over a $20 cent.
And the same was going for Bitcoin as well.
It was possible, or for some certain stablecoins that are backed by centralized groups, They still have the possibility to freeze or not allow you to send those transactions.
So not every currency is fully decentralized.
There are ways to stop people or put sanctions on certain addresses or coins.
That's true.
I mean, Canada did that.
They blocked certain addresses for the Bitcoin exchanges over which they had power in Canada.
But the nice thing about Bitcoin is even if nations outlaw it, there are going to be plenty of nations that don't outlaw it.
And as long as there are nodes running, right, you're up and running.
And I even had someone was asking me on the decentralized TV chat board last night.
I said, well, what about if the power grid goes down?
You know, what about crypto?
And I've mentioned this kind of thing before, too.
But the honest answer is the power grid is not going to fail everywhere on the planet all at the same time and stay down.
You're going to have regional failures and the nodes keep running where they are.
And then when the power comes back on, that node catches back up, downloads the blocks.
Boom, it's sinking again.
So you can't clobber Bitcoin by taking down a power grid in New York, whereas you can take out or I mean, not you, but, you know, some event could take out, let's say, you know, Wells Fargo or Bank of America because their storage is really, really centralized.
Their databases are centralized.
Now, they may be mirrored in more than one location.
I'm sure they are, but it's still not that many locations.
Whereas Bitcoin is, what, how many hundred thousand nodes are running around the world right now?
Yeah, and if there's two nodes running in some country, you're safe.
I think the chances are...
Very, very close to zero.
That the whole world could go down at the same time.
Definitely, when compared to some servers in America, much more centralized.
I'm curious, Bitcoin is an amazing asset that is also a gateway for people to understand more about Web3.
There's so many people that still yet to encompass Bitcoin, but for those that have, they see the possibilities of what blockchain technology can do through other industries or to rebuild the financial system in a more fair, transparent way, and all of the industries that do transactions or store data.
And I'm curious on if you...
Have looked into, you know, the other Turing complete blockchains like Ethereum and the other layer ones and their applications towards making other industries better or a few more focused on Bitcoin.
I'm in the food business.
We buy and sell millions of dollars of organic food products every year.
In particular, I see many problems with counterfeit documentation in the food supply chain.
We run into many issues.
This is why we do our own lab testing on foods, which you probably know, because we'll get so-called organic samples of foods from Some Asian nations, for example.
And then we'll find out, oh, it's laced with glyphosate, so these are counterfeit.
I can see blockchain with a lot of applications in certifying the documentations in the supply chain for lots of things.
You know, medical devices, for example, not just food.
But agriculture, farming, I think it's really critical.
If you want to know where your food comes from, if you want to buy coffee, for example, and you want to know that's a fair trade coffee from people that pay fair wages and don't enslave small children to pick coffee beans all day or whatever.
Blockchain has applications there.
But I also think blockchain has major applications in elections.
I interviewed Ruben Yap from FIRO, which is a privacy coin project.
They actually did a pilot project.
They ran several hundred thousand ballots during a recent election in Southeast Asia.
I love the idea of being able to guarantee the integrity of ballots and make sure that ballots can't be counted more than once, they can't easily be counterfeited, they can't be stuffed, or what have you.
The future of any kind of representational government depends on having election integrity.
So blockchain has a role in that as well.
As you know, Ashton, there are so many applications for it.
I think the establishment is slow on purpose to apply these things because they don't want integrity.
They want to be able to cheat.
They want to print money whenever they want to, whereas you and I have to earn it, but they just want to print it, right?
Or they want to print ballots or make things up, like print fake science or whatever in the medical journals and then only retract it two years later when it turns out the whole thing was fictitious, right?
So what if you had clinical trials using blockchain for the records of the participants so that nobody can go back and fudge those numbers?
You know, that would be a breakthrough for medical science.
And then half these studies that we've seen published over the last few years would have to be retracted because they're mostly fiction.
So anyway, lots of applications.
Yeah, totally.
You're completely right.
And it's a hard game to play because the powers that be in most of the industries that are controlling them, blockchain could improve those technologies, but it would probably not be beneficial for the people that are running those industries.
So where does that balance come in where eventually the people just say, it needs to be more transparent or else we're boycotting the whole industry?
Well, and I think that's going to happen with currency and money, by the way.
I'm of the belief that we're looking at a major global debt collapse coming up and a collapse of the fiat currency banking system, which will look a lot like either bank bail-ins or bank freezes, holidays, whatever, where if you hold your assets and dollars in the banking system, you'll wake up one day and you'll be alerted, oh, yeah, your deposits are safe.
But they've been converted into ownership shares of this bank ABC and you can't sell those shares for the next two years and so on.
And that's going to be a real shock to a lot of people.
I also believe that when that day comes, We're good to go.
Gold and silver, I'm a big fan of gold and silver, obviously.
Sales were through the roof.
At that time, for a period of about a month, the premiums on silver were 50% of the spot price.
No one had seen anything like that in the history of the silver industry, at least not anyone that I know.
I think we're going to see that again, but also crypto went up, too, because people were saying, where is my money safe?
And where do I have custody where it can't be taken from me?
Forget about that.
Self-custody is key when you can't trust the banks.
And in Bitcoin, you take custody.
You put it on your own wallet.
Ideally, you run your own local node.
And then you have custody.
You have your seed phrases.
Nobody can take it from you.
Whereas if it's in the bank, they just take it and then they tell you, we took it, it's ours, good luck.
I'm done with that, personally.
I'm not playing that game anymore.
A lot of people are with me.
Yeah, no, I completely understand and I agree.
And I definitely think that there will be some huge premiums on gold, silver and Bitcoin.
And the smart people should be probably accumulating it, you know, on an average cost or when there's not the hype because they're thinking ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
You mentioned Monero and some other privacy coins.
They're even better to diversify in terms of being able to send payments more anonymously.
When the Silk Road and some of those other marketplaces, the funds were seized by the government.
They had all the list of the assets that they had seized.
So many thousands of Bitcoin, so many tens of thousands of Litecoin.
Monero unknown.
They just didn't even know.
They couldn't even seize it.
It was just like, well, there's no way to look into people's wallets.
And I've been a fan of this kind of technology.
I feel like it will be integrated into more cryptocurrencies, not Bitcoin, but some other ones that may be up and coming.
But there's also, I'm sure...
You have personal experience using Monero wallets, and there's obviously not as many nodes as Bitcoin, and there's not as much adoption, but it does have a use.
Do you see a growing use for coins like Monero and other privacy-focused coins now and in the coming years?
Absolutely, for two reasons.
And remember, Monero has very high liquidity.
Not as high as Bitcoin, obviously, but it's the highest liquidity of daily volume of any privacy coin, and it's higher than most non-privacy coins.
And the reason is, again, extra utility.
Think about, you know, the advantage of blockchain is it forever inscribes on the blockchain your activity.
It can always be mined and parsed going backwards in time to see what did this person do?
Or it could always be, you know, retroactively linked to your IP addresses or KYC or whatever, KYC exchanges.
But Monero...
It can never really be mined like that unless there's a quantum computer breakthrough of some kind, which would change everything in the world anyway.
And also, Monero is working on a lot of enhancements.
Seraphis, for example, and full membership proofs that are going to greatly expand the anonymity set to make it virtually impossible for even quantum computers to be able to determine transaction amounts and wallet IDs, the sender and receiver IDs, and so on.
I find that in me using both Bitcoin and Monero and other coins, I find that Monero ends up being my go-to coin for sending money to people simply because I don't have to go through the extra steps.
Like with Bitcoin, I'll use CoinJoin or Whirlpool or whatever because I want to anonymize it and that there's extra costs, but more importantly, time.
So you can spend a couple of days in the Whirlpool on that and get your coins back out.
Depends on how many times you want to mix them up.
But with Monero, it's like, boom, every coin is fully fungible, fresh.
It's like a minted, mined coin, every coin, all the time.
So I can just pull up Monero, I can send, I can receive, and I don't have to worry.
And again, I just want to be clear, I'm not doing anything illegal.
I'm not immoral or unethical.
I'm sending donation money to good people who are doing good work for humanity.
It's just that it's nobody's effing business who I'm sending money to.
That's all it is.
So that's why I use Monero for sending money to people.
I love it.
I saw you did a recent podcast on the Maui Lahaina efforts.
I feel like they could definitely benefit from Monero and Bitcoin and decentralization because there's so many red flags there and blocking of funds and items and press and everything.
It just seems like screaming red flags.
It's crazy.
I mean, we're facing a whole new world of terrorism against the people, in my view.
I mean, they didn't sound the sirens.
They turned off the water.
They blocked the roads.
I mean, it was just on.
They called off the fire department.
And, you know, the people, their children burned alive, you know, and then they were offered $700.
From the government.
Nothing makes any sense about that.
And it's a land grab.
These people are having their land stolen.
It's like they burned them out and they're stealing their land.
That's what's going on.
And that is wrong on so many levels.
It's pure evil as far as I'm concerned.
But you're right.
If they had been able to...
You know, organize supplies in a decentralized way instead of waiting for officials to tell them it's okay because the officials seemingly, apparently, were told to just get in the way of everything.
You know, don't let supplies, don't let donations happen here.
Don't talk to the press.
You know, don't...
It was crazy.
Decentralization would have solved this because every single individual wanted to find, you know, the survivors or their family members.
Every person wanted to help.
You know, the outsiders coming in wanted to donate supplies.
Just organically, the people could have solved this better if the government had just gotten out of the way.
And that's a universal truth, it seems, in markets and in manufacturing and exporting and transportation.
If the government would get out of the way and let the people have honest money and work on their own blockchains and honest ledgers, we would all be more wealthy and more free.
Well said, Mike.
And I'm curious on your thoughts looking forward into the future about Bitcoin adoption.
And, you know, obviously there's big players, the players that don't want it to, you know, the financial system and people that don't want it to get out of hand.
I feel like they're also buying in as well, you know, whether it's through these ETFs that they're trying to do with BlackRock or just accumulating institutions.
I know institutions have been accumulating Bitcoin since 2014.
Do you think Some kind of event will happen to trigger Bitcoin going to all-time highs.
Will it be the collapse of the dollar or will it be some other catastrophe?
Well, I want to be clear.
There's still a lot of volatility.
I'm concerned about the bankruptcy of Evergrande and possible ties to certain stablecoins.
Those could be factors that drive Bitcoin lower.
But as you said, the failure of the dollar, which I think is right around the corner, I think will drive Bitcoin very, very high.
I don't know how high.
I'm not here to play a price speculation.
On it, but I think that the utility of Bitcoin will be realized by a lot more people and it's the utility.
You see, I was never a fan of speculation and just, you know, hodling for the sake of hodling.
I've always been a fan of having coins that are useful and that adds the intrinsic value to them, that people value these coins because they can do things with them, such as sending money to others or using it in e-commerce or using it at the local farmer's market or having it as a store of value that they can use later, things like that.
I do think that the technical barriers are still substantial for a lot of older users.
That's for sure.
I mean, I'm in my mid-50s, and most people my age and older are not that up to speed on using crypto and using wallets and so on.
But as the population ages together, and we're moving through these demographic groups, you know, The younger generation has had so much technical expertise in using mobile devices and also crypto that as they come into more and more money, which naturally occurs as they age and have more important jobs and bigger salaries and so on, we're going to see, just demographically, we're going to see crypto be used by more and more people who control more and more money.
But I don't think that the people who are 60-plus today Most of them are never going to really use Bitcoin day to day because it's just, I don't know, they didn't grow up with it and it's just a little too tricky for them to understand, especially just confirmations.
You know, like, oh, I sent out this, or somebody sent me something, and I got it, and then I sent out part of it, and then you have to explain, you know, unspent transactions.
Where'd my money go?
Like, you know, it's going to take a certain number of confirmations for that to come back to you, to get changed, and you're like, oh my gosh, now you're trying to explain this stuff to somebody who's just, no.
Either that's got to be made simpler, or we just have to wait for the younger generation to move in and control more money.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, that's a great point.
And especially noting that most of the people who run the country are over 60 or even over 80.
They're going to start using Bitcoin.
Oh, man.
I mean, that's a problem all on its own.
Like, what are these octogenarians doing, you know, running the country right now when some of them can barely speak?
But anyway, we're not going to get into the politics side of that.
I'm just saying there are better choices and brighter minds who can help solve problems.
That's all I'm saying.
For sure.
Well, I've seen a lot of advancements in wallet technology over the past few years and making a better user experience, even for people in their 20s and 30s.
It's going to make it easier for people to, just as they would have their You know, Google Pay or just credit cards.
It's just as easy.
I think that barrier is narrowing where people have to understand the intricacies and it's all in the back end.
So I'm definitely seeing more adoption on it.
Yeah, well, let me mention, I mean, the Cake Wallet, for example, I think is very simple.
And even just the native Monero GUI wallet is also super easy to use.
And, you know, Bitcoin Core, it's not that difficult.
It just takes a long time to sync and things like that.
What I like to see is the fact that there are faster systems like the Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin so that there are faster confirmations that can then be hidden from the user.
I mean, I don't mean in a nefarious way, but just the average user doesn't need to know everything under the hood.
They just want to know, is my money here and when can I use it?
And that's it.
And so I think that the simpler wallets will just tend to kind of Push those other technical features into the background.
You can get to them if you want to, but you don't need to see all that stuff just to use it.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And I don't have a lot of time left, Mike, but I'm curious, moving forward with Decentralized TV, growing out the podcast, bringing on awesome guests.
I've seen a few of the episodes so far.
What's some of your goals with spreading the word on decentralization?
Well, by the way, I have Robert Kiyosaki coming on to Decentralize.TV, and we've got Andy Sheckman.
We've already filmed that interview as well.
And a lot of people who are actually from the world of gold and silver who are also talking about decentralization and crypto to some degree.
So what's really fascinating to me and what I'm hoping to do with this show, because I'm an old-school Austrian economics guy.
We follow Ron Paul, like I said, and people like Lou Rockwell and so on.
And I'm starting to hear a lot of people in the Bitcoin space now talk like Austrian economists and understanding the importance of freedom and self-custody when it comes to money.
I didn't hear that as much four or five years ago.
So really there's a convergence happening of a lot of the old gold money people and the newer crypto people are coming together and it turns out that they believe Many of the same things.
And so I'm trying to get both of those groups on the show and show that commonality and show that any kind of honest system of exchange can work.
It could be silver coins, it could be gold coins, it could be crypto.
And of course the nice thing about crypto is all the divisibility and the redundancies and so on.
As long as it's an honest ledger, that's the key.
That's what Robert Kiyosaki told me recently.
He said, I won't invest in anything the government can print.
Good advice.
Yeah, definitely.
That's amazing.
I'm definitely going to check out that episode with Kiyosaki.
He's one of my idols as well.
Oh, yeah.
Where is the best place to watch Decentralized TV? It's at decentralized.tv.
That's it.
Okay, and I'll leave that in the description box below as well.
Thank you.
Mike, thank you so much.
Appreciate your insights into everything with Bitcoin, decentralization, and Brideon.
Continue the good fight, and let's definitely follow up in the near future.
I'd love to, Ashton.
And let me add one more comment.
We don't stop at just decentralization of money.
We also teach decentralizing food and medicine and knowledge and information and communication.
So it's all those things.
You need to decentralize your food supply, too, if you don't want to starve or have food rationing.
So grow some food, folks.
Great point.
I'm going to leave all those other links and anything else you want in the description box below for all the viewers to check out.
And thank you so much, Mike.
Thank you, Ashton.
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