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Sept. 21, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:11:59
Episode 15 – Sep 21, 2023 – KRAKEN representative Alexander Van Aken reveals pro-liberty philosophy
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Welcome to another episode of Decentralized TV here on Brighteon.com, the free speech platform.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and we have a special guest for you today.
It's Alexander from Kraken.com, which is the online crypto exchange that, well, there's an interesting story, actually, about how we resolve some issues and they've become my number one recommended platform for purchasing crypto.
My co-host, Todd Pitner, joins us today as well.
Welcome, Todd.
How are you doing today?
Thank you.
Hola!
Excuse me, I'm great.
I'm really looking forward to this interview with Alexander.
I just want to ask, how did it come about that he's so awesome?
Because nobody managed you, Mike Adams, better than Kraken did with Alexander, you know, at the wheel.
For sure.
He's been a lifesaver.
I mean, he's a real value to the Kraken brand, let me tell you.
But let's bring him in.
Alexander Van Aken, did I pronounce that correctly?
Yeah, yeah.
Hey, it's nice to meet you guys.
How's it going?
Nice to meet you in person.
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us, and also thank you for reaching out and resolving issues.
I guess we'll tell the story shortly, but could you just introduce yourself for our audience, your title, and what you do at Kraken?
Yeah, for sure.
So I'm an account manager at Kraken.
So I help with VIP clients such as yourself.
And I've been at Kraken for five years.
We actually just celebrated our 12th year anniversary.
So I've been here for almost half of Kraken's life.
So really, really fun place to work.
And I've been loving it.
And we get to meet awesome people like you guys.
So, you know, it's been great.
Well, that's awesome to hear, and we really appreciate you coming on the show and just telling people about Kraken.
And I also want to disclose, this is not a sponsored interview or anything.
We don't have any kind of relationship.
I'm a client of Kraken, and you did help me to maintain that relationship in ways that we'll talk about here shortly.
But before we get to that, can you, for those who, for whatever reason, if they don't know what Kraken is, can you just give us the short version?
Yeah, for sure.
And since you threw out a little disclaimer there, I will also do my little spiel too.
You know, like none of this is investment advice.
I'm not a lawyer or an investment advisor or anything like that.
Yada, yada, yada, etc.
Your question was, what does Kraken do?
Was that what you asked?
Yeah, just sort of what's the short intro to Kraken as a platform?
Yeah, so we started out as a Bitcoin exchange and now we've got over 200 different cryptos to trade and we have a whole suite of products.
We're also looking to launch some really exciting stuff like Kraken Bank and all kinds of cool stuff.
So yeah, it's come a long way since I joined in 2018.
We're looking to really become a full-fledged financial services company.
And now all these big TradFi firms like Charles Schwab and all these guys are now our competitors now that they're kind of launching their own crypto products.
So it's really exciting to not just be competing with Coinbase and the likes of them, but now we're competing on the global stage of all the financial firms.
So it's a really cool place to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would imagine.
I mean, cutting edge and also just innovating the future of money.
In some really innovative ways.
And is it fair to say that Kraken is known for being cutting edge?
For example, Kraken lets people purchase Monero directly, which a lot of exchanges don't do that.
But even in the crypto space, isn't Kraken kind of like a renegade pioneer?
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I mean, we definitely haven't always been like the fastest movers.
We've been a little bit on the conservative side and playing something safe, but we also do like to keep as much territory as we can.
For example, when other platforms were delisting Monero and Dash and Zcash, you know, we've just kept chugging along because there's really no law.
That says we have to delist them.
I think in Australia, we have to delist.
But in the US, there's really nothing keeping us from those assets trading on the platform.
So yeah, we have Monero and I think we also have, was it Secret Network or something like that?
So we're a big fan of privacy by default.
Of course, we do have to do basic KYC stuff, but we have no problem with people buying Monero and withdrawing off the platform and going about their life.
And that's the number one use, by the way, that our customers will pursue with Kraken is to simply buy crypto and then take it off-site for self-custody.
Like, that's pretty much what I do.
Yeah, yeah.
We actually recommend it because, you know, we're not making any money off of people holding funds on the platform.
We only make money off of the trades themselves.
And so there's no point in keeping it on the platform.
After you make a purchase, you might as well just withdraw it.
And if you want to sell it, you can send it back.
But yeah, there's no point in holding on the platform.
Even our CEO, Jesse Powell, has gone on record saying that, yeah, you might as well just withdraw once you're done with the purchase.
Yeah, it actually reduces the burden on Kraken because you're responsible for people's funds if they keep them on the platform, where once they withdraw it, it's their own challenge.
And I hope they have a backup of their seed phrase and all those kinds of things.
Todd, you want to pop in a question before I ask Alex about...
Or introduce the story?
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, I think some centralized exchanges would really like you to keep the crypto on the exchange so that they could rehypothecate or get into fractional reserve.
So can you share with everybody what other competitors might do?
And basically, I just want to get to the fact that When you're with a centralized exchange, not Kraken, I don't know if your Bitcoin is necessarily fully fungible because they may be issuing the same Bitcoin as an IOU. I mean, who knows?
You mean like fractional reserve?
Like they don't hold what they're supposed to hold that they owe people?
Yes.
And right on Kraken's website, it's all about transparency, right?
Yeah.
Right, right.
So a good example of that was we kind of helped pioneer the whole proof of reserves thing for crypto exchanges.
And so for, you know, multiple years now, we had been, you know, cryptographically proving that each customer's balances are actually on the platform.
And when you brought this up, you know, the first thing that popped into my head was FTX. Yes.
You know, a lot of people were talking about that, you know, maybe about 10 months ago.
And, of course, you never saw them once recommend that you withdraw funds off the platform, right?
It kind of goes to show that they really did want you to keep everything on there so that they could do whatever they want with it.
Yeah, and then there are other exchanges that make you keep it on there.
Right, Robinhood?
Mike Adams?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I've had issues.
I think those guys, yeah, I think they're slowly building some sort of wallet to let you withdraw it or something.
But yeah, you're right.
Some of these platforms, they don't even have an option.
I think Venmo and PayPal, you know, don't really let you withdraw them either.
So it's questionable as to whether or not that's by design or if they're just prioritizing other stuff.
But yeah, it really makes you question what they're prioritizing.
Or if you're really buying crypto, maybe it's just a Chuck E. Cheese ticket.
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe they just want trading fees and they don't actually want to buy actual coins for you to have.
Stranger things have happened.
Or they just...
I mean, Fidelity, for example, you can buy Bitcoin, so to speak, on Fidelity, but you can never withdraw it.
So it's really...
I mean, how do you know it's even Bitcoin?
It's just sort of a Bitcoin proxy, I suppose.
Yeah.
But Alex, let me share the story of how we met.
I'll keep it short, but it is kind of interesting.
So I've had a history of being debanked by PayPal, kind of like Nigel Farage has been in the UK, and a lot of influencers and certain political figures have been targeted.
Dr.
Joseph Mercola.
His staff was targeted by J.P. Morgan Chase for his operations in Florida.
They targeted the family members of his staff and said, you can never bank with us, and your children can never bank with us.
I mean, it was insane.
Your progeny.
Yeah, right.
Like, we're going to do genetic tests, and if anything matches Dr.
Mercola, they're debanked.
So, I had an issue where I was trying to join multiple platforms, and I was Gemini and Robinhood, and I had problems with Coinbase in the past, and I signed up for Kraken, and it was all going smoothly at first, and then out of the blue, I received an email, it was like, we had to close your account, and we can't tell you why, and you're not allowed to use Kraken.
And so I posted that publicly on some of my social channels, like, this is crazy, why is Kraken banning me?
And I haven't even bought anything yet on Kraken.
I hadn't done a single transaction.
And then it turns out that you, Alex, reached out to me to try to get to the bottom of what this was, which was amazing because no other platform reached out to me at all.
And you were able to establish that there was a security concern that maybe somebody was impersonating me, and that's why that happened.
But then you were able to get my account reinstated, and I have been buying crypto on Kraken ever since.
So it's been smooth sailing.
So thank you, Alex, for doing that.
No problem, yeah.
I mean, at Kraken, you know, we're pretty proactive with stuff like this, you know, if there's ever, you know, an influencer-type person or anything like that who's having trouble.
And, yeah, it turned out there was just, like, some false negatives.
And so, yeah, I reached out, we got your account turned back on, and, yeah, the rest is history.
Yeah, it was very cool.
Is that your new nickname, Mike?
False negative?
False negative?
I don't know, I've heard false positives.
I don't know about false negatives, but...
So the one question then that I did get from some of my viewers about this is they said, okay, well, you're Mike Adams and you're well-known and you're an influencer, but would Kraken do the same for me?
And my answer to them was, well, I think that...
Because I was Mike Adams that maybe there was extra scrutiny that maybe they thought somebody was impersonating me and also because I'm in my 50s and not a lot of crypto people are actually in my age bracket, it turns out.
But It doesn't matter.
I mean, but Kraken, I think Kraken gives good customer service to everybody.
It's not just, you know, so-called VIPs.
Or do you want to speak to that, Alex?
Yeah, that's something that we've always taken.
I would say, like, we take security of utmost importance and then right behind that is customer support.
And so, you know, back before most crypto platforms had live chat and phone support and, you know, the three pillars of customer support, if you will.
We were kind of the first to launch all three.
And so we've always taken customer support very seriously.
We've always, you know, had some of the quickest response times, things like this.
And in account management for VIP clients, you know, it's even better.
And so we have a little bit more autonomy to sort of, you know, escalate things a little bit better than normally would be possible.
So yeah, luckily, someone kind of brought it to my attention.
And, you know, I quickly...
We started taking action, started having people, hey, let's check this out.
This guy's pretty important.
And so, yeah, luckily...
Do you actually recall how many days it took us to turn that around for you or how many hours?
It wasn't very long.
It wasn't very long at all.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Maybe a day.
Yeah, yeah.
That's what I think, too.
So yeah, we've always taken it pretty seriously.
The last thing we want is someone going to social media and saying, man, I hate Kraken.
They screwed me over.
Yeah, I was on that path, by the way.
But you resolved that issue.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that's actually what helped bring it to our attention was, you know, your initial, you know, dissatisfaction, if you will.
And I was like, all right, well, let's turn him from a Kraken hater into a Kraken VIP. And you did.
And you did.
I mean, you did it.
Seriously.
Alex, you turned it around.
Now Kraken is the only platform that we recommend on this show.
And that's not even, again, it's not a sponsorship type of arrangement.
It's just we want to give people things that work, tools that work.
And I know you agree with me, Todd.
Hey, Todd, didn't you just sign up on Kraken, too?
I did.
And mine's a little bit unique because I'm trying to sign it up as a business, so I've been working with Alex and the team, and so I'm just in the process now of being able to supply the materials to them and everything, but yeah, I'm going to be 3-2-1-go as soon as I get them all the documents.
Yeah.
Well, see, and I went to my CFO and said, you know, get our business signed up with Kraken as well.
And that sign-up has already happened.
And then they went through the process of getting, like, larger and larger transfer amounts approved for the business.
Because, Alex, let me actually present this case to you that one way that we want to use Kraken...
And that I think Kraken would be very good because at pro level, the trading, the margin or the spread between buying and selling Bitcoin is very small.
And so a business like ours, we can actually take money, fiat money, that we know we're going to have to spend on future inventory, such as the food products that we sell.
That we purchase and sell.
We could push it into, let's say, just Bitcoin if we believe that Bitcoin is a better store of value than the depreciating value of the fiat currency dollar in the banking system.
And if we take self-custody of that Bitcoin, then we don't have the risk of a bank collapsing and losing our money with the collapse like Silicon Valley Bank.
And then we can convert it from Bitcoin back into fiat as needed to pay our vendors if they only accept fiat.
So have you heard of that use case of your platform, Alex?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, a lot of companies choose Kraken, you know, kind of for their corporate treasury, you know, because they'd rather hold, you know, some form of crypto other than dollars.
You know, I don't know if you guys believe this whole 7% inflation thing, but I think it's pretty obvious that it's much higher than that.
It's much higher, yeah.
At least double, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, that's very common.
Yeah, many companies choose us for, you know, purchasing their crypto.
With food, Mike, it's more like 50%.
With certain food items, it certainly is.
Like meat, for example.
But we don't sell meat.
But even for the things that we sell, the legumes and the superfoods and the nutritional supplements, inflation, easily 25-30% a year right now.
No question about it.
Yeah, I've actually got a little prop for this very conversation.
Have you ever seen a Venezuelan Bolivar?
Oh yeah.
This is a Bolivar from Venezuela.
I think it's the old Bolivar.
So they actually killed off this currency and made a new Bolivar where you had to transfer these in and redeem them for another one.
So this is actually Venezuelan toilet paper now.
And so just had a little prop handy for the call.
Well, if you're going to show that, Mike's going to whip this out.
I've got trillions of dollars of failed currencies right here from all kinds of countries, from Yugoslavia, and I have Hollywood money of fiat currency greenbacks right here that's also going to be worthless.
So, yeah, we've got a whole pile of fiat failures.
This one has a squirrel on it.
I mean, whatever bill this was, it's got a squirrel.
Yeah.
They stopped even putting presidents on it.
They're like, ah, nobody trusts the presidents anymore.
Let's just start putting animals, like zoo animals on these things.
The ironic part is now these things have collector's value instead of, like, inherent value, right?
So that's kind of funny.
Alex, how did you find your way to Kraken?
So, it's a really funny story.
Y'all will actually find it pretty interesting.
So, in 2018, I went to this conference called Anarcapulco.
Have y'all ever heard of that?
Oh, yeah.
I spoke at one recently, yeah.
Nice, nice.
So, yeah, I went there with my girlfriend at the time, and I ended up meeting this guy who worked at Kraken, and he gave me his card, and I applied a couple months later and got hired almost immediately.
And this was actually in a bear market, too.
So it was honestly a miracle that that happened.
And so, yeah, it's been a roller coaster ever since.
I started at the kind of, you know, bottom of the barrel, so to speak, like a customer support specialist and, you know, been slowly chipping my way up the ladder here.
I was 23 at the time, so it's really incredible to have this job at that point in time.
I'm 28 now, and I've been loving it.
It's been only five years, but it feels like 50 years because crypto is pretty crazy sometimes.
What percentage of your paycheck do you put into crypto, if I dare ask?
Since you work there.
The minimum I do is 10%.
And then for things like getting bonuses and stuff, I'll do some extra.
But yeah, like 10% is the bare minimum.
That's awesome.
I think that's very wise.
You're going to be very happy, I think, that you did that.
Do you like to diversify across lots of cryptos?
Or are you kind of in love with a few?
I'm kind of a Bitcoiner now.
Honestly, I feel like I get a little too stressed if I have to check a whole bunch of different ones, different prices and stuff.
I've definitely got some gray hairs here from all the different Things going on in crypto.
I am a pretty big privacy advocate though.
I would love for more privacy tools on Bitcoin, so that's definitely something that I'm a little torn on.
I know that you guys are very strong privacy advocates too.
Yeah, we try to make Bitcoin private.
Yeah, we've tried all the tools, you know, Sparrow Wallet and Samurai Wallet and all these other things, Coinjoins and Whirlpools and different addresses and so on.
There are things that you can do.
But I have another question for you, Alex.
I did not realize how much risk that Kraken, the platform, takes.
With the fact that people are depositing fiat and then withdrawing crypto.
So the crypto side is irreversible, but the fiat deposit side is in many cases reversible if someone claims like wire fraud.
So I think it's remarkable that Kraken, you know, I can wire money to Kraken.
It gets accepted.
I can buy, let's say, Monero, and I can withdraw the Monero the next minute, even before that Monero could possibly have enough confirmations on the blockchain.
And so I realize that Kraken is taking that risk, that that might be a fraudulent wire or something.
You want to speak to that?
How does Kraken...
I mean, first of all, is that accurate, that there's a lot of risk on the fiat side?
Yeah, there's definitely risks on both sides, I would say.
This is sort of why we try to catch, quote unquote, bad accounts during the signup process.
Because like you pointed out, once it's been funded, you're kind of running out of time to take action.
And so yeah, there's definitely risk on both the fiat and the crypto side.
On the fiat side, We also have debit card, credit card type stuff, so you've got chargebacks involved with that.
And then on the crypto side, We do allow coin joins directly to the platform.
So you can coin join Bitcoin and then deposit to Kraken.
But if you deposit it from a dark web website where chain analysis has flagged it or something, that's something where a crypto deposit could then be put on hold.
So yeah, there's definitely risks on both sides.
You know, big shout out to all of the customer support folks at Kraken who, you know, 24-7 are checking for stuff like this.
We do have a wide variety of, like, automations and stuff for that.
But you're right in that, you know, there is definitely risk.
And some of these, you know, third parties, like chain analysis, sometimes go down and stuff.
So it's, like, sometimes...
There's issues where it's not even our fault necessarily that something's going on.
A lot of that is just to keep our asses covered.
We live in the US, not easy to do business over here, but we're committed to staying over here.
We're going to be the last exchange in the US if we have to.
You've seen some drama with Coinbase and Binance and the like.
That's actually my next question, is about the regulatory environment.
I mean, there's been good news with the Ripple court case, XRP. But of course, the SEC and Gary Gensler and so on appear to be at war with crypto, which seems insane to me.
And I don't know if Kraken ever offered staking.
The reason I don't know is because I never do that.
But that was an issue that got, I think, a lot of other exchanges in trouble, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, so we had staking for several years up until February of this year.
Okay.
At which point we did have like a settlement with the SEC. And part of that was we would remove the staking product from the U.S. And then right after that, Gary Gensler did his victory lap and he was like, oh, well, all they had to do was come into my office.
And it's like, obviously, we would have done that if now it's all we had to do.
We've got hundreds of lawyers and so I'm pretty sure we could have sent one of them to his office if that was all we needed.
But it's pretty obvious.
Why there's a regulatory attack, though, you know, because there's the incumbent banking system and the incumbent stock exchange system, and both of those are sort of becoming obsolete, right?
And so they have no choice but to attack us.
And so that's kind of...
We're in the then-they-fight-you stage, and so...
Right.
It's definitely a very exciting time now.
Well, Todd, he just used the word obsolete.
I have to completely agree.
Yes.
I mean, and especially, you know, look, our guest today, Alex, he's a lot younger than you and I, and I think, especially people like 35 and younger, they get that the TradFi system is broken.
It's obsolete.
It's stupid.
It's slow.
It's inconvenient.
I mean, who would want to use regular banking if there's a better alternative?
What are your thoughts, Todd?
My thoughts are that that's why we have this show, to be able to educate people and get great guests like Alexander on, because to get out of the system, you have to stop using the system, right?
And that takes a certain amount of initiative that we all need to have to just...
Maybe just even put our toe in the water.
That's why we are working really hard, Alex or Alexander.
I can do both.
We're working very hard to be able to identify groups of buckets, if you will, for decentralized living, and then within those buckets do our own assessment and almost rank.
Like for exchanges, Kraken is number one in the exchange bucket.
So congratulations on that.
I have a question, though.
Of the Bitcoin that's transferred into you, do you know through chain analysis or other analytics, what percentage of those you won't accept?
I'm not really involved in the teams that handle that sort of stuff.
I couldn't really even give you a ballpark, but as far as my clients go, I mean, none of mine have ever had trouble with that.
Okay.
And like I said, this would be like Bitcoin coming from addresses that have been previously flagged as criminal activity and stuff like that.
Like a Canadian trucker.
No, nothing like that.
I mean, with that to be said, I think...
Well, he brought up a good point about the Canadian trucker thing.
You know, that was something where I think the Canadian regulators were coming at us and saying, okay, here's a list of names, just shut down all their accounts, seize all the funds.
And Canada has actually continued to enact stringent regulations where now I think our Canadian clients, some of them are limited to only $30,000 of Quote-unquote altcoin trades per year.
Per year?
Or I think it's purchases per year.
Unless you're an accredited investor and then you can buy more altcoins per year.
But yeah, Canada, it's not looking good over there.
I mean, it's not looking good over here either.
I'll be totally blunt with you, but it looks even worse over there as far as crypto goes.
How do you think it can get worse over here?
What do you think their next moves might be from a regulation standpoint?
Well, just the other day, there's this rumor that came out that the SEC wants Coinbase to delist every asset that isn't Bitcoin.
I saw that.
So yeah, it'll be very interesting to see what will happen with that.
Because, I mean, that also implies that they want them to get rid of stablecoins too, which is like, that's just a dollar, right?
Right.
How could that be a security or anything?
So, yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm not plugged into the whole legal side of things.
I'm kind of, you know, just eating my popcorn over here on the side.
But, yeah, I mean, that would be how it could get worse.
Do you think they...
Sorry, Mike.
Do you think that they ever might come and say, hey, if it is private by default, it's outlawed?
Honestly, from my, you know, cynical perspective, I'm kind of surprised that they haven't done that yet.
They did that in Australia and maybe one or two other countries.
But yeah, I mean, I think that they're not really doing their homework very well and they're just trying to attack all of it at the same time.
Because if I was the incumbent financial system and the surveillance system and all that, I would certainly want all the privacy to be removed immediately.
And maybe to even create mandated addresses where it's like a vanity address where it's like your name on the blockchain instead of just a string of digits.
Time to your eyeball scans.
I don't want to give them too many evil ideas to do.
Don't worry, they have plenty of their own.
But this underscores the importance, those of you watching this, of getting your crypto...
If this is part of your plan, right?
Again, I'm not your financial advisor, but if you hope to have some percentage of your assets or savings in whatever crypto is right for you, then you might want to think about doing that before the SEC gets more aggressive.
So Kraken.com, you can show my screen, by the way, Kraken.com is where you can go, K-R-A-K-E-N, And you can just sign up here, and then you can start purchasing crypto, and you can then withdraw it and take self-custody, which of course is what we all recommend, so that you have the crypto under your control.
So even if the governments go after exchanges like Kraken, even though Kraken's got a lot of lawyers and is going to put up a very strong defense and so on, but no matter what happens with that situation, if you own your keys and your crypto and you have self-custody, then It's impossible for the governments of the world to come after every person wallet by wallet.
What are they going to do?
Knock on people's doors if they can trace their BTC to a KYC? And what about all the Monero holders?
They don't know who those people are, where to find them, of course.
So it's impossible.
So if you have the crypto in your possession, you've got it.
And possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say.
So I'm just putting that out there, Alex.
Alex, here's another evil idea for them.
And I think at one point in time, they were pretty close to being able to, when we were in the bear market, I remember, is when they would actually tax your unrealized gains.
And I think that could come.
That's crazy.
Could you imagine with the volatility of crypto, and you're in this bull run, and you're like...
And then that's when you get hit with, hey, you have $100,000 in gains.
You owe 35%.
And then it drops, and they don't acknowledge the fact that you can write off your losses, too.
Right, right.
I mean, the reality of what these people want is they want to tax us 100%.
So they want to tax the deposits.
They want to tax the trade.
They want to tax the withdrawals.
And they're just figuring out ways to do all that.
Yeah.
This is something where many people at Kraken are actually sort of libertarian or anarchist at heart.
And we've got all kinds of black emojis about how taxation is theft and all this stuff.
So it's a very strong sort of anti-tax culture at Kraken.
And so, yeah, I mean, this is something that I'm sure it's something that they're thinking of.
How can we make every crypto owner...
I don't own zero crypto anymore.
And still have to pay tax.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, that's an impossible accounting scenario, though, Todd, for them to say you have to pay the unrealized gains on crypto.
Or even, I mean, we interviewed another guest, as you know, that said, frankly, the only time that you owe any gains, this is his view, Is when you transfer, you know, you translate crypto back into fiat.
And then if you have a gain, then there you go.
You have a gain on an asset, not even a currency because crypto is not recognized as legal tender in the United States of America.
So it's just like buying a book of stamps or, you know, art or historical firearms or whatever.
It went up in value.
You sold it.
You pay on the gain.
That's it.
But anyway...
Let me change the subject here for a second, Alex, because we only have you for a few more minutes.
I said earlier, I'm in my 50s, and crypto has been known to be something that a lot of younger people, of course, are into, but a lot of people on the older side tend not to understand the tech or to be interested in the tech.
Are you seeing any shift in this?
Because, as I have pointed out on the show, it's people in my age bracket that actually have Most of the money in this country because we've been working our whole lives and hopefully we have some savings from that, whereas a lot of people in their 20s typically do not have a dollar to their name other than what they need to pay rent.
So are you seeing any kind of shift in the demographics of who's using Kraken?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm actually kind of surprised if I ever see a client that's my age.
It's normally, you know, even in the 30s is a bit young for what I'm seeing.
So like you said, people of the older demographics are the ones who have the majority of the wealth.
And so they're also the ones who have started their own businesses on average and stuff like that.
I think I only have one client who's my age or younger.
And so it is Definitely shifting towards it being more accepted towards the older demographics.
And I think part of it may be the likes of BlackRock getting in the game and Charles Schwab and Fidelity and all these guys.
They're starting to realize like, oh, wait a second.
Everybody's getting into this.
It's not just something my son or my grandson is in.
Now it's something that I can do.
And so I will admit this.
It's a little difficult explaining some of this stuff to my older family members and stuff.
They go, okay, explain it to me.
And I'm just kind of sitting there.
I'm like, all right, well, do you want to have dinner or do you want to have a three-hour long conversation about why the financial system is broken and how it's going to...
Birth into flames any second now.
It's definitely a little difficult explaining crypto sometimes.
But let me add that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the banks that collapsed, what was it, like February, March timeframe earlier this year, that also forced an education onto people who have money.
Because if you have money and you put it in the bank, I mean, I know people That one weekend when SVB went down, because that was the weekend that here in Austin, Texas, I'm not far from Austin, they had that festival, what's it called, the big festival in Austin that everybody goes to, that makes it impossible to park anywhere.
Is that South by Southwest?
Yeah, South by Southwest.
So there were people at South by Southwest who were going bonkers because they had lost all their money, they thought, until that Sunday, then the FDIC said, oh, we're going to bail you out even over $250K. But for one weekend, a lot of people thought they had lost everything.
Thank goodness they had shrooms.
Yeah, they probably did.
They probably needed them.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's an interesting time because Kraken actually got a banking charter license in the state of Wyoming several years ago, I believe in 2019.
And so we've basically been trying to launch Kraken Bank for like four years now.
Doesn't take a researcher to realize we've been getting stonewalled in the process there.
Oh, wow.
And probably the big reason is because we want to have a full reserve bank where there's no fractional reserve.
There's no lending.
It's just you put your dollars in the bank.
We custody it.
You spend the dollars or whatever.
You just hold it, and that's it.
No fancy anything.
Maybe a debit card would be the fanciest thing.
But obviously, the banking system...
Does not want competition and they don't want innovation and they don't want us.
Anything trustworthy.
Right, right.
They want the status quo and nothing else.
And so that's kind of where we're at with that.
And honestly, I have high hopes for Kraken Bank.
I'm really hoping that we can, you know, fulfill that.
Well, Apple has launched its bank and that's been very popular as I understand it.
Right, right.
I mean, maybe if we were a trillion dollar company in S&P 500, then maybe we could launch it immediately.
But they also have Goldman Sachs.
I think Goldman Sachs is the one who actually does the custody.
Yeah, you're right.
But yeah, maybe if we partnered with Goldman, we'd get approved right away.
But obviously, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Yeah, I think Apple makes $200 million a day.
We do like 500 million in trading volume a day, so obviously like a fraction of that is actual revenue, but we're slowly getting up there.
Well, I've got to say that I think that real-world events in the traditional finance system, or TradFi as it's known, are going to force people to really educate themselves about the viable alternatives.
And we now have the launch of the FedNow program, and more and more people are learning about coming CBDCs, central bank digital currencies.
Money is going digital, and I think the only question...
That people need to entertain is, do I want my money under a surveillance grid control system run by a dishonest ledger by a government that just prints monies and devalues the value of the digital dollars that I have in their system?
Or would I rather have an honest ledger, i.e.
Bitcoin, where nobody can print the money?
I mean, not without warehouses full of proof-of-work servers or whatever, but so there's effort involved.
You can't just like, oh, here's another trillion.
That's an honest ledger.
Where the value is intrinsically guaranteed by that algorithmic scarcity.
And I think when people understand the difference between those two, it's not even a choice.
It's obvious.
That's my take. - Right, and it's honestly surprising that the banks are not trying harder.
Like, is it really 2023 and they're closed on Sundays?
What kind of shit is that?
Here we are.
It's 110 years after the establishment of the non-federal reserve bank, which has no reserves.
And they're finally launching some sort of new product or service that ultimately no one's going to give a shit about unless they do some sort of UBI or...
Stimulus checks, that would be what gets people to download the wallet or whatever.
But yeah, it's interesting to see that.
We just laugh at stuff like that because nobody who's in crypto is going to be like, oh, I'm done with crypto.
They got the Fed now.
I'm going to do that now.
But I will tell you, more than 50% of the people More than 50% are going to be marching in and saying, oh, this is super convenient.
I mean, it's sad, but it's true.
NPCs are a thing.
No, they'll have their eyeball scanned and whatever.
Yeah, yeah, the world coin and all that stuff.
Saliva samples.
Here, lick the sensor and you'll get your money.
You know, whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
That's crazy.
The education is really a big part of what we need to do.
Speaking of...
Speaking of, does Kraken offer anything?
Because one of the things I've been covering crypto for the last three years, and I originally started out just my journey of getting into crypto as an older guy.
And I'm like, I'm such a newbie, I know how to spell Bitcoin, but that's about it.
And so I decided to document my journey.
And I will tell you, crypto is really, really hard, you know, until it's not.
It's really scary.
And so many ways of you being able to get scanned.
Does Kraken have any kind of programs to where newbies could, almost like any course material that they can go in and study or where you can guide them?
I think that would be so much value add if you did, and you probably do.
Yeah, for sure.
We've got our Learn Center where there's hundreds of articles in there to learn not only about each different cryptocurrency, but about the general topics and nuances of how it all works and everything.
And then we do publish blog posts and all kinds of stuff when there's a certain topic that's coming up in the news.
But yeah, I believe that's kraken.com slash learn, but we can maybe double check that and put that in the show notes later or something.
That would be fascinating.
I'd particularly love to see if you have just a Crypto 101 course.
Yeah, here it is.
I got it on my screen.
Oh, you do?
You are all correct.
Yep.
Learn more about crypto right here.
Boom.
Crypto 101.
Beautiful.
In-depth resources.
Oh, what is DeFi?
What is cryptocurrency?
Oh, great.
All this stuff.
Yeah, good stuff.
Yeah, because, you know, look, like I said, this show, what's great about what we're doing is that we're reaching a demographic about decentralized living and decentralized finance, a demographic that usually they're not going to the conferences.
You know, they're not the 20 year old, you know, Bitcoin maxis or whatever.
And they don't even not even sure about the language.
So we try to translate what this is into into just regular everyday terms for people who often people who have a lot of money, a lot of assets.
And, you know, to be a millionaire today is is not that big a deal.
A million dollars doesn't even get you that much anymore anyway.
So there's a ton of millionaires out there, or quite a few billionaires as well, and some of them are friends of the show and people who donate money to alt media and so on.
We're trying to show people who are panicked, almost, about the collapsing dollar and the collapsing banking system.
And if you have a million dollars, and you know the FDIC only covers 250K in any bank, then, you know, people run around and try to open four bank accounts and put 250K in each of the four bank accounts.
And what if they have another million?
What are you going to find four more banks?
I mean, it's stupid.
You should just...
Well, I can't tell people what to do with their money, but I would go...
What have you done, Mike?
Gold, silver, and crypto.
That's what I've done.
Gold, silver, and crypto.
That's it.
And you self-custody the metal, of course, right?
I self-custody the metal.
I self-protect the metal with my security dog and my Glock and my AR-15 also.
You're also very fond of lead.
I collect lead in certain shapes, like 0.3 inches in diameter and so on.
Yeah.
We're very much pro-gun rights at Kraken, too.
Is that right?
Actually, during COVID, when everything was locked down, some of us were flying to Austin, believe it or not, to go to the Guns and Bitcoin conference.
Oh, perfect.
No way.
I didn't know there was.
Yeah, it's all about 3D printed guns and how you can buy them, buy the blueprints with Bitcoin and all that stuff.
Oh, that's cool.
Pretty cool guns there.
I've got to go to that conference.
It's coming up in October, I think.
A little free little plug for guns and Bitcoin.
Cool, okay.
Well, that sounds like something I need to go to because I have 3D printers too.
I've been running 3D printers for years.
Alex, by the time this airs, I'm sure it'll be launched, but I'm launching decentralizeddirectory.com.
And within that, I'm going to have, talking about the different buckets for decentralized living, I'm going to have an exchange area.
And I would love to work with you and your team on some ideas on how we can add some value in that directory to where basically my goal is to have relationships to where the people who come through decentralizeddirectory.com are going to get white glove treatment on the other side.
And again, Mike and I discussed this, the demographic is probably going to be similar to Mike's, and so you're looking at people who may have higher net worths, who just don't necessarily want to screw around with the learning curve necessarily.
They may not be as technical, but they have a lot more assets.
Right, right.
So I'm looking for relationships to where we can work together to help them on-ramp to where it's less painful.
Are you open to that?
Yeah, absolutely.
I'd love to extend the same kind of hospitality that Mike here got and you got, Todd.
So definitely feel free to add my contact info there.
Excellent.
And we can get the whole decentralized family here on board.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Yeah.
And Alex, since we're almost out of time, I just want to give you the floor.
What would you like to wrap this up with?
You know, leave our audience with what they need to know about Kraken.
I mean, I think we covered most stuff.
I think we just need to, you know, buy Bitcoin, buy crypto, end the Fed, be happy, be healthy, be good to each other.
Amen to that, brother.
And I didn't ask the question that I emailed him and said I was going to ask, which I said the first question I'm going to ask is, when did you stop beating your wife?
But he told me he's not married, so I couldn't do that.
No wife, no girlfriend right now.
Nobody's getting beat over here.
You're going to have all these girls contact you like, pretending they want to join Kraken, but they actually want to go on a date with you.
That's probably what's going to happen.
I'll put my phone number in the show notes.
Decentralized dating.
Go on a date with me, I'll teach you about crypto.
For starters.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool, cool.
Well, it's all good.
This has been awesome.
Yeah, Alex, you're awesome, and I hope the folks at Kraken recognize that you saved this relationship.
The reason that Kraken is even being mentioned here on this show is because of you, and I thank you for that.
And frankly, we're plugging Kraken pretty much in every show now, aren't we, Todd?
Yeah, we have been.
Kraken's just the default platform to recommend.
Yes.
Awesome.
For our audience members, I forgot to mention too that if you're in the state of Texas, at first the default daily limit of a wire transfer is $25,000.
And so if you have a lot more money than that, and you're trying to transfer more, which I was trying to transfer more than that, because I'm not leaving anything in the banking system.
So you've got to get special permission, like more documentation, to open that up to do more than $25,000.
Right, Alex?
Yes.
Yeah, so the US dollar funding is a little bit different in Texas.
We're kind of limited to only one of our banking partners.
I'm not really quite sure why that is, but I know that there's some sort of legal slash regulatory thing that's only in the state of Texas.
So we basically just need a little bit more documentation for people to get higher limits in Texas.
But I think that only took a couple hours to knock out for you, right, Micah?
Yeah, it was really fast.
All good.
Cool, cool.
Awesome.
Yeah, and I don't mind the KYC process because, frankly, I'm mostly just ending up in privacy coins anyway, so there's no KYC attached to the coins that I hold, which is, and I'm very open about it.
That's what this show is about.
It's all privacy anyway, so it's all good, man.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Alice.
Can you actually have a...
A boating accident in Texas?
I guess you can.
You have lakes there, too.
There's boating accidents all the time.
People lose their firearms all the time at the bottom of lakes.
Or you can just forget your seed phrase, just say you forgot it, and you're good.
Yeah, Mike, your memory is so good.
You can just start drinking those avocado smoothies and blame it on that.
No, you know what's going to happen?
Since I've been public about my speedcubing habit, no one's going to believe that I forgot my seed phrase.
Since I've got like 60 algorithms here.
But whatever.
Age catches up to all of us, so yeah, maybe I forgot it.
But Alex, it's been great.
You're awesome.
We appreciate you.
We appreciate Kraken.
And you're definitely a friend of the show.
You're welcome back anytime.
It's been a pleasure to meet you guys.
And yeah, feel free to send any friends or family my way.
I'll make sure they get the white glove treatment.
Okay, we'll do that.
Thank you so much.
Have a great rest of the day.
We'll talk to you later.
Take care.
Take care, guys.
Take care.
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All right, Todd.
Well, that was a great interview, huh?
Love that guy.
Just, you know, great energy, great customer service, obviously, great company.
And great culture there, too.
Exactly.
I mean, they really get it.
They do.
They do.
And yeah, you know, it's these kind of conversations.
This is what I love about this show and meeting so many different people is it's going to allow the directory to be built out with really great people who Who get it going in, that people who go through the decentralized directory are going to get special treatment that they would not get anywhere else.
And I just find that so encouraging, Mike.
Oh yeah, I'm so glad you're putting that together.
That's going to be decentralizeddirectory.com.
So check out that website, folks.
That should be live by the time this airs.
And I'll also mention, by the way, that we have an affiliate sponsor.
And we'll have a link to this on the main show website and probably also on your directory as well.
The main show is decentralized.tv.
This is an affiliate sponsor that offers de-Googled phones.
Which are, and I've been running de-Googled phones for many years, and I'm not going to spend too long on this because I want to talk about Kraken here for the rest of the show, but these are de-Googled phones that are running Graphene OS with a special set of applications, and you can actually purchase data-only SIM cards using cryptocurrency, including privacy coins.
So this is a way that you can have a completely anonymous private phone that That doesn't spy on you.
And even when that phone is talking to the cell towers to get data or to run a voice over IP app as a simulated phone number, then that can never be tied back to your name or your identity.
Yeah, that's a big deal.
And in fact, that guest is coming in studio.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, so that's going to be an affiliate sponsor for the show as well.
And let me just say this, too, about Kraken and privacy and everything.
You know, our morals and ethics and who we reach on this show, you know, we are legitimate, honest, ethical people running honest businesses.
I run a food business.
It gives people clean food.
You know, you have a consulting business, Todd, and a lot more.
You're building a food forest.
And the people that we influence are people who have...
They've run their own businesses.
They've earned a lot of money.
They save money or they have contributed to society in meaningful ways.
They're not criminals.
They're not child kidnappers or drug runners or whatever.
But yet we understand the importance of privacy and so does Kraken.
It's about the right, the human right to privacy.
And just because we might have money that we want to move around doesn't make us criminals, even though we're always treated like criminals by the traditional financial system.
Right, Todd?
Yes.
You are guilty.
Just for having money, you're guilty.
Just for buying crypto, you're guilty on Robinhood.
Well, I think you'll get more Pacifics from them soon, though.
That's an inside joke.
You've got to explain that.
That's an intentional mispronunciation.
But we won't go into Pacifics about that right now.
No, but it's kind of our where's Waldo now.
Yeah.
It is kind of funny.
We're not doing the bonus hole anymore, but you might catch us with Pacifics every once in a while.
We'll switch over to Pacifics.
Okay, but getting back to Kraken.
So here's the thing.
Kraken has been super easy to use.
The interface is really elegant and easy to understand.
The platform tends to kind of intentionally hide a lot of the more technical aspects from the user on purpose, which makes sense.
Like if you buy crypto, you're not presented with, oh, here's the block explorer and how many confirmations and all this stuff that the average person doesn't want to see anyway.
Right.
Like I don't even...
The typical person is like, forget that.
Just tell me, did I buy the Bitcoin or not?
So Kraken, at the basic level, it's very simple.
And then if you want, you can get into the pro level, and then you can have the full trading platform, which is what I use now, because purchasing is less costly.
You can set buy limits and sell limits and whatever.
I don't sell, though, by the way.
I've never sold anything on Kraken.
I've only bought.
That's probably the way it's going to be.
Spirit of full disclosure, I have been acquiring crypto, private crypto, for two and a half years, and I have not sold one coin.
There you go.
Yeah.
Why would?
I'm trying to get out of traditional finance.
Exactly.
Not into it.
Right.
Now, you have to have the stomach, because it's very volatile, right?
Yeah.
But over the long haul...
Your money's safe.
And we're in a crypto winter right now, which frankly...
As painful as it is to so many, if you're new, not investment advice, but just saying this is not a bad time to be able to start getting out of green cash into private money.
Well, the way I figure it, Todd, I tend to agree with what you said, although, of course, we don't give financial advice on the show and we don't make price speculation targets.
But all I want crypto to do is just hold value, and I'm thrilled.
If it goes up, okay, amazing.
If it goes down a little, I'm even okay.
Because dollars are going down every day in terms of their purchasing power.
So I figure, you know, some people say, well, crypto is risky.
You know, there's a 50-50 chance of losing.
You know, going down one day or whatever.
I say, well, there's a 100% chance if I hold dollars that those dollars are going to be worth less tomorrow.
That's 100%.
And I've got to buy groceries.
And I wish the grocery store would just take Bitcoin, frankly, or...
That would take a day and be very expensive transactions.
Yeah, Bitcoin.
Maybe they should take Dash, right?
Because Dash was really fast for point of sale.
So if they took Dash, I would just buy Dash and use that at the grocery store.
But the point is, the only reason I'm ever going to have dollars is if I need to buy groceries or gasoline or whatever.
I'm no longer, I'm not keeping dollars around hoping that they're going to hold value because they're not.
I'm keeping crypto and gold and silver around and lead and copper bullets for protection, whatever.
And stored food, you know, things like that.
And then I'll convert some back into fiat if I need the fiat.
Right.
That's it.
But I'm hoping to buy things in crypto more and more, and I think that's happening.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
Yeah.
What a great interview.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
So are we done?
Is that it for the discussion?
Yeah.
Well, I thought it was a great interview, and I think we're both thumbs up on Kraken and Alex.
And frankly, it sounds like his entire team, right?
The team of service providers and customer care people.
Yeah.
Look, they are not official sponsors of this show, but we'll certainly behave like they are.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Look, I just got to say, you know, I've had horrible problems with Gemini and Robinhood.
I've been very public about that because I'm full transparency anyway.
And Kraken's the only platform that has actually reached out and proactively resolved issues and has been working flawlessly ever since.
With Gemini, I couldn't get a customer service response for three weeks.
I mean, imagine...
Did you ever?
Did you ever...
Yeah, I got some kind of response, but the situation is still not resolved.
I was able to transfer out of Gemini in fiat, so it only had a little bit left over there, a few hundred dollars, so I pretty much just abandoned it.
Right, right.
Whatever.
And then on Robinhood, they froze something like $1,200 of my assets, and they wouldn't let me transfer out fiat.
So I'm still working on resolving with Robinhood.
And, you know, again, my main message to all these platforms is you advertise, like, come here and buy crypto.
So I go there and buy crypto, and then you say, oh, my God, we think that might be fraud.
Right.
Well, like if you were in the lemonade stand business and people showed up to buy lemonade, would you accuse them of fraud because they bought your lemonade?
Oh, you bought our lemonade.
Must be something wrong with you.
We're going to freeze your lemonade account.
Are you people idiots?
Yeah.
It's like a car dealer.
Like...
We won't sell you a car because we think the only people that buy cars from us might be criminals.
And it's like, my God, I gave you my passport.
I gave you my driver's license.
I wired money to you.
And then you have a problem with me buying Bitcoin?
What is their business model?
Thank goodness Kraken responded the way they did, because I think if they didn't, you would have probably put an X brand on every exchange out there, because I don't think you would have had one good experience.
I would have had to call for people on the show, like, who wants to sell me Monero for gold?
Exactly.
We're in the P2P. Yes.
Here's my secret email address.
Email me if you want to sell Monero.
No, I didn't have to do that, thanks to Kraken.
But seriously, Todd, and I'm not trying to drag out the show.
We can wrap this up.
But the thing is, what is the business model of these platforms that advertise crypto but don't let anybody actually buy crypto?
I don't know.
How are they not bankrupt?
Maybe they are.
And I think they're just looking over their shoulder at the regulators not wanting to be sued, you know?
But I wasn't doing staking.
I think that's the big...
Yeah, yeah.
And I wasn't bringing crypto to the platform and selling it for fiat.
Like, oh, here, take this dirty Bitcoin from who knows what Silk Road somewhere and give me cash for it.
I wasn't doing that.
It's entirely irresponsible on their end.
It makes zero sense.
I can't square the circle, Mike.
No, yeah.
Yeah.
It would be like if you were on Amazon.com and you were buying books and they said, oh, the only people that buy books might be criminals.
Your Amazon account is all locked up.
Or it's like you go to Home Depot and you get all of the supplies for the lemonade stand and you build it with your kid.
And then the kid goes and sells lemonade and then you ground your kid for selling lemonade.
How dare you?
It just doesn't make sense.
But I will say this, what I have learned in this whole process.
So, you know, once I got money wired to Kraken and got it out of the banking system, which is always the hard part, getting it out of the banks.
Once I got it wired into Kraken, from there, smooth sailing, right?
You can buy crypto.
You can withdraw it.
You can then do what you want.
I can swap crypto.
I can get these other altcoins, like the other ones that we've interviewed on the show.
That's how I bought Firo, for example.
I got Bitcoin and I swapped Bitcoin for Firo.
And nobody has any power to stop you from doing those things that you want to do with your money.
Including, by the way, if you want to blow your money, if you want to Invest in some crap coin, alt coin that goes to zero.
You're free to do that too.
It's your money.
It's your responsibility.
And that might happen to some coins that I bought too.
But I'm trying out a lot of different methods of buying a lot of different things.
So I do expect to lose some.
But that's my responsibility.
I would ask that you do this just to go through the whole process.
I'd be interested in you trying to get, like, take $5,000 out of crypto and back into your bank.
See how that process works.
Have you done that?
No, because I don't want to create a taxable event.
Ah, okay.
That's why.
Got it.
Because, yeah, like when my accountant, who I'm pretty sure works for the IRS, when my accountant asks me, have you sold any crypto?
For fiat.
I need to be able to honestly say no.
I haven't, and I have no intention of doing so.
Well, if anybody out there has experience with Kraken and has done that, because I know a lot of people, it sounds great to get everything out of fiat into crypto, but there are things that happen in our lives.
That's true.
So it would be nice to know that when they really need it, that, oh no, that part doesn't work.
I've never done it either, so I wouldn't know, but...
Yeah, that's true.
Well, we can ask our audience on that.
Right.
And I think that'll be okay.
Let me bring in today's sponsor, and then we'll wrap up this show.
The sponsor of our show is the Satellite Phone Store, SAT123.com, bringing it up, where you have, of course, backup satellite communications.
So this is more decentralized than the cell tower system.
But of course, it's not completely decentralized because it goes through the satellites and those companies that run those.
But it's Iridium for these satellite phones, and it works anywhere on the planet.
Oceans, deserts, you know, anywhere that you could possibly be except underwater in a poorly designed submarine.
Don't do that.
It turns out that's a bad idea.
The bivvy stick here does two-way satellite texting.
So, that can save you in a, you know, you have a hurricane.
You're in Florida.
You could have hurricanes there, Todd.
And you need to be able to text your other friends and family members like, I'm okay!
The food forest survived!
You could use the bivvy stick for that.
That's right.
It would totally work.
So, sat123.com.
That's the sponsor, the satellite phone store.
And then for the affiliate sponsorship of the de-Googled phones, running a de-Googled Android-based operating system called GrapheneOS, which I have used for several years, go to decentralized.tv and look for the link there to the de-Googled phone solution.
That's our affiliate sponsor.
So anything else you want to add, Todd, before we wrap it up?
No, I'm just looking forward to the next interview.
And the next, and the next.
We have so many great guests lined up, and we've had so many great guests.
And, you know, at the point in time people are watching this, it's probably been, you know, a few weeks.
And we're trying to chug them out as quickly as possible.
But, you know, high-class problem, Mike.
I know.
I know.
I'm jumping on my editors.
I've got two editors now working on these episodes full-time.
That's amazing.
And I'm the bottleneck for reviewing.
And some of the earlier interviews we did were very long, by the way.
Because we did not wrap it up.
And we did a lot of discussion.
And one of them is like two and a half hours.
So we may have to cut that a little bit.
But that was worth it.
I think people should hear all two and a half hours.
Those are called bonus minutes right there.
Yes.
So yeah, it's all good.
Oh yeah, hey, one more thing.
Let's plug the hats and the cups and everything.
Do we have camera one working today?
I have mine on the way now.
There we go.
Look at that.
Oh, you do?
Okay.
So the company, the website that does this is called redpillprints.com and they've got also t-shirts that are decentralized TV. Here's one of the shirts and there you go.
Pretty cool.
DTV logo.
And just to say, they're not a sponsor, and we don't earn anything off of this, but we're supporting this company because they're a pro-liberty company, and they agreed to do these designs and just make this available to our audience.
So go to redpillprints.com, and you can buy this stuff.
And they're going to have a special section.
I learned this yesterday, Mike.
They're going to have a special section just dedicated to our show.
That's right.
Yeah, so I don't know where that's going to be on their site, but if you go there, redpillprints.com, I don't know, scroll down, look around.
You should be able to find the Decentralized TV swag section, and you can get whatever you want, mugs and hats.
I think it'll be pretty self-evident.
Based upon the conversation.
So, yeah, excited about that.
We're excited to be able to help different people who just, you know, they need a little bit of support.
Well, absolutely.
That's how the world goes around.
And remember, if you're watching this, if you have an online business and you are willing to accept cryptocurrency as payment, then we may be happy to plug you, again, at no charge, depending on what you're selling.
We're not going to, like, plug...
Like online weed sites or whatever.
CBD would be okay, but we're not plugging like, you know, get high, smoke these joints, but that kind of thing.
But, you know, like regular stuff, we're happy to plug you for free.
And Todd, you could put them in the directory too, right?
A hundred percent.
There you go.
So you're going to get free publicity, folks.
Yep.
You just got to take crypto.
Right.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, very cool.
Yeah.
And we're going to be taking crypto at healthrangerstore.com.
I can't wait.
As soon as our devs get it all done.
And I can't wait for that as well.
That's going to be great.
All right.
Well, that's the episode for today.
Thank you, Todd.
It's a wrap.
Cheers.
Good stuff.
And thank all of you for watching.
Of course, I'm Mike Adams here, the founder of Brighteon.com.
And also, Todd and I are thrilled to bring you this new show, Decentralized TV, which is becoming very successful, getting a lot of traction.
Thank you for your support.
Remember that you cannot share Brighteon links on Twitter, by the way.
So you can find this show also on Rumble.com.
It's right under the video that's on Decentralized.tv.
You'll see the link right under there.
So that's what I do is I'll go and I'll copy that and then share that on Twitter.
There you go.
Yeah, you'll find the Rumble link on Decentralized.tv for each episode.
And we invite people to please come visit us in Telegram and just search for Decentralized TV. There's not a.TV in the Telegram one, but if you do just search for Decentralized TV, then join, and we have a great discussion group in there.
I think we already have like 500 members or something in there.
I think that's right.
Yeah, it's a really animated discussion.
Probably more now.
And look, we're open.
You can pitch us if you think you might be a great guest for the show.
You have a really interesting project.
But don't just go into the group and start shilling your coin or your project or something.
Just be respectful of the group.
It's not a Craigslist.
But if you've got something to pitch us that you think is viable for the show, we'd be happy to take a look at it.
Don't DM Todd or myself with some pitch like you need money or whatever.
Please.
That's not cool.
And if you're in Telegram, when somebody does DM you, it's likely a scam.
So just always be wary of that.
Right.
Watch out for people impersonating us.
But there's a whole lot of hot women out there that just come and tell me hello by direct message.
I'm sure that's true.
It must be my fame of this show.
Yeah.
Everybody out there, that's going to happen to you too.
And just swipe...
Swipe left, which is delete.
Is that what swipe left means?
Is delete?
Well, swipe left in Telegram is delete.
Oh, okay.
I know that.
Okay, I thought you were referring to dating sites.
Yeah, I've not used those apps.
No, the people tease me about that because I never get it right.
Do you swipe left, swipe right?
Do you smash the phone on the concrete?
What do you do?
I have no idea.
That's not my wheelhouse.
But if you want to know about food science, yeah, I'm your nerd for that.
Or do you shoot left or shoot right?
I think you're the man that can probably...
I am an ambidextrous shooter with the pistols, as you know.
I had to train with my left hand a lot because of my finger injury.
So I'm pretty darn good offhand shooting at this point.
That's great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would show you my Glock, but I don't think it's wise to flash firearms on camera.
Probably not.
Probably not a great idea.
Yeah.
We could just remove the slide, though, and show you the slide, but whatever.
Okay.
Well, thanks for watching today.
Again, Decentralize.tv is the website.
And I'm Mike Adams with Todd Pittner.
I hope you enjoyed the show today.
And be sure to check out Kraken.com.
As you know, they are not only our number one recommended platform, they are our only recommended platform for buying crypto because there is no number two.
There's nobody else that I know of.
There's a lot of number twos.
Okay, there's a lot of number twos, but there's only one Kraken, and that's who we're recommending if you want to buy crypto.
All right, thanks for watching today, everybody.
Yep, take care.
Cheers.
Bye.
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