Crypto liberty advocate Aaron Day talks PRIVACY coins, Zano innovations...
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Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV here on Brighteon.com, the free speech video platform.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon and also Brighteon.ai, which will be releasing our new AI language model on March 1st. And it's revolutionary. Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that free open source model for decentralized knowledge for humanity.
Now, our special guest today is a returning guest.
We'll introduce him in a moment.
He's a superstar in this space.
But first, let me welcome our co-host, Todd Pitner.
Welcome, Todd, to the show today.
Always great to have you.
Hey, Mike.
Hey, you know what?
Two recordings in one week.
I think people might start talking about us, Mike.
What is this, huh?
You know, I gotta say, Todd, doing this show with you is the most fun that I have in the studio.
Well, I can't wait for the after party.
I signaled you before that I had a conversation with a couple today during a consultation.
It was the funniest thing all week, and I can't wait to share it with you.
Yes.
All right.
Well, you never know what kind of funny things can come out of our interviews.
That'll keep people hanging until the after party, I promise.
We do kind of tend to lose it in the later minutes of our conversations.
But let's bring in our guest right away.
It's Aaron Day, and he is the founder of DaylightFreedom.org, and he's currently warning about the CBDC threat, and he's also an advocate of freedom for Roger Ver, who is facing persecution and prosecution by the United States government, simply for Wanting to leave the country, pay his exit taxes, and mind his own business.
So Roger Veer is on our minds today as we welcome Aaron Day back to the program.
Welcome, Mr. Day.
It's an honor to have you back on.
Oh, thank you for having me.
We really enjoyed our first conversation with you many months ago.
Made a lot of waves.
We got a lot of great feedback about it.
Just give us the quick introduction about your Daylight Freedom organization and what your current focus is before we get into Roger.
Sure.
My wife and I started the Daylight Freedom Foundation, but before that I'm also a fellow at the Brownstone Institute.
My entire focus is on warning people about the threats of CBDCs and teaching people about solutions that they can adopt outside of the existing monetary system so that we don't get stuck with CBDCs.
That has been my sole focus now for two years.
I wrote a book about this called The Final Countdown.
And my wife and I have traveled now, I think, to 24 states, and now we're actually starting to go international next year, where we host four-hour workshops.
And in the first half of the workshop, we explain the threat of CBDCs, what the implications are, what the long-term goal is of CBDCs, which, of course, is complete and total digital control.
And then the last half is a real hands-on workshop.
So by the time people leave the workshop, they will actually have a crypto wallet with self-custody crypto.
In it, they will have a gold back.
And then we're going to, next year, we're going to start onboarding merchants in the workshops as well so that merchants will walk the workshops with the ability to take crypto.
And my vision for this is that we will have these newly onboarded consumers actually buying something directly peer-to-peer from newly onboarded merchants in the workshop.
Oh, can we be one of those merchants, please?
Absolutely.
We have been trying to integrate crypto for the longest time, and unfortunately the e-commerce platform that we use is not, they are no longer crypto friendly.
And, you know, there's been this regulatory assault on merchants and e-commerce.
Now perhaps that will turn the corner here with the new administration coming in, but, you know, we need to be able to do this ourselves without having to depend on government approval.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I mean, to be honest, I'm not entirely optimistic about the direction of the administration.
While I'm hopeful on some things, the actual crypto policies, even coming out of the Republican side of things, have given more control to banks And add more reporting requirements and actually take away power from the consumer.
So this is why peer-to-peer adoption is critical.
And I have been emphasizing now for the last probably six months an absolute emphasis on privacy coins.
And in fact, more particularly privacy by default, meaning coins that you don't have to do anything.
They're just private by their nature.
You don't have to add any additional steps to make them private.
They just are private.
Well, you're speaking our language, man.
We are big fans of privacy coins.
And the privacy coins, they receive the brunt of the attacks on the exchanges.
So, Todd, you want to chime in on just the whole privacy coin side of this?
Sure.
Aaron, I covered privacy crypto for three and a half years.
That's how Mike and I ended up meeting.
He had watched some of the shows.
And since we've been recording, I kind of took a hiatus.
But in back...
on YouTube now.
That's why I mentioned before the interview, I'd love to get you on to talk about crypto and specifically private crypto, because frankly, the ability to move value privately is a God-given right, I think.
And through this assault with the CBDCs, and I call them the Druid Babylonian bastards out there that just want to talk about centralization, that want to financially centralize all of our lives.
It is more important now today, especially since Bitcoin is now receiving a greater adoption, a mass awareness.
That's good and that's bad.
And I think it is beholden to people like us three to be able to educate people on all of the positive attributes of privacy crypto.
And there are some really, really good, high-quality solutions out there, aren't there, Aaron?
There are some great solutions.
And I was actually just at Minerotopia speaking at an event in Mexico, which Minero is one of the or is probably the top privacy coin.
But actually, there were several projects there.
Sure.
Dano was there, Pirate Chain.
And one of the great things that I see happening out of this event is that it's less tribal.
There is kind of this emerging consensus that we need to do a better job as a group at marketing.
That privacy, to your point, is a God-given right.
It's not a niche thing that people wearing Guy Fawkes masks and people just dealing with the black market.
This is something that is for everyone.
But I will tell you, doing these workshops, and I'm kind of in different spaces.
I'm one part in the crypto space, one part in the liberty space, and then the other part of me is actually outside of those, traveling all over the world, meeting with people in a variety of different contexts and different demographics.
And this is the most troubling thing that I've found.
So older folks that aren't necessarily as technically capable understand the value of privacy.
Younger people, I actually just saw this Cato poll a few months back that showed.
that showed that I think 33% of Gen Z would be okay with the federal government installing surveillance cameras in the home to monitor for domestic violence. - What? - So while they're very technically proficient, they actually don't value privacy.
So this is the challenge that we have is how do we make younger people understand the importance of privacy and then how do we take this privacy technology and make it easy so that everyone can use it?
I have an idea.
I have an immediate idea.
How about educate them?
Let's go through a case study on the government taxing unrealized gains in all assets, but even in crypto that tends to have like 80% retraces.
Let's war game that and then maybe they'll have a different perspective on how that is so financially damaging potentially.
Yeah, and I think, too, that the more years you live, the more you begin to distrust the government.
I mean, it's a natural thing.
I mean, you get out of school, you start going into business or running your own business or being a contractor, and it starts adding up all the ways that government is screwing you, looting your paychecks, spying on you, preventing you from doing things that you want to do, or if you own a business.
So maybe that's just a generational gap, but it is alarming, Aaron, That people are okay with being spied upon.
I do think that there will be a really shocking demonstration at some point here of government overreach.
And, you know, I mean, one of those actually just happened.
We're being told by our own government now to stop texting on mobile phones because China hacked the illegal government surveillance infrastructure that spies on our phone texts.
And, like, why isn't everybody in the country saying, WTF? What's going on?
Why is our government spying on us and opening a back door so that other nations can hack that spy system?
Aaron, your thoughts?
Well, I mean, the problem with this is, I mean, Edward Snowden laid out in painstaking detail how this has been going on for, well, I think, what, 2013 is when he really started to expose this stuff and put a lot of that information out there.
So we've known for a complete decade that there are back doors and everything.
That the government can essentially turn on our, you know, cameras and microphones on our computers, even when they look like they're off.
We know that, and that they do do this.
We now know that there's all this bulk data collection and that somebody can sit in Langley and, you know, just say, hey, I want to know what's going on at this address.
And it even gets weirder than that.
I mean, they can actually...
Detect from your Wi-Fi router.
They can actually detect what's going on within the house and can kind of reconstruct what's going on physically within a space.
You know, which humans are there and how they're moving around.
So the amount of surveillance here isn't far behind China.
In fact, in some cases, it's actually worse here.
I don't know how you make people concerned about it because I think, on the one hand, again, younger people have grown up in this environment where they're living their lives online.
And they're just accustomed to it.
And so I don't know.
I mean, I would have thought that COVID tyranny would have woken people up.
I would have thought that this unveiling of the censorship industrial complex would have woken people up.
But it almost seems like, you know, in some ways we've woken up and in some ways people are going and opening themselves up for more surveillance and they're doing it voluntarily.
Part of that, by the way, there's a synergistic effect.
The vaccines do cause a certain amount of brain damage that literally makes people more susceptible to obedience control systems.
That's not a conspiracy theory.
That's medicine.
I was just interviewing an expert on that very point.
But they go hand in hand.
Like the governments or the globalists will use chemicals or poisons to weaken you biophysically.
And then they'll use info psyops in order to control you and push you into a surveillance grid system or social engineering type of control systems.
And that's why this show is so important.
And also the focus of today's show, Roger Veer, is so important because Roger Veer teaches people.
He's like the Paul Revere of liberty.
So, Aaron, talk to us about Roger Veer, if you would, please, and his plight and why we are all calling for incoming President Trump to consider a pardon for Roger Veer.
So, first of all, I met Roger in 2012 at a Free State Project event.
It's called Liberty Forum.
And he gave this real electrifying speech about Bitcoin.
And in fact, I know a lot of people that are now well known in the Bitcoin field heard about Bitcoin for the very first time at this talk.
And Roger and I play this segment all the time, but he basically said, hey, this is money.
That, you know, people can use for cash anywhere in the world, separated from central banks, separated from central authorities.
And this is a way to stop war and violence and to spread peace and voluntary interaction throughout the world.
And that was the ethos of Bitcoin From, you know, kind of 2010 until 2015. And so more than anyone, Roger actually spread this word of voluntary interaction through Bitcoin.
He was the first retailer to take Bitcoin.
He was the first investor in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And he's always been steadfast about the need for peer-to-peer cash that anyone can use, that's fast and cheap and that's separated from state.
That's always been his passion.
He previously, you know, he'd been a libertarian for a while.
And he'd run into trouble with the law.
While he was running for a libertarian assemblyman or something like that, he actually was arrested for selling illegal fireworks through the mail.
And he's the only person to have gone to federal prison for this.
In fact, Cabela's and others were actually selling these fireworks.
But they went after him because, as a libertarian, he was out there Challenging the ATF and Waco and killing children.
He was saying things like taxation is theft and war is murder funded by theft.
And that's why he ended up spending 10 months in prison.
So he decided after that period, like 2001, he was done with the United States, that it's not safe for him to hold his views and express those views in the United States.
So he started to look to expatriate And it took a while.
I mean, it actually, because he had this conviction, a lot of countries weren't eager to take him on.
And so it actually took him until about 2014 to finally land in St. Kitts, and he expatriated.
And he paid an exit tax.
When you expatriate, when you leave the United States, they basically put a tax on all of your assets, and you have to pay a single exit tax.
He hired lawyers to do this because he knew they would be hypercritical of him.
Based on his previous experiences, his previous speech, he knew he had to dot all of his I's, cross all of his T's, and he did.
And then 10 years later, they come after him, arrest him in Spain three weeks after he publishes this book, Hijacking Bitcoin, where he talks about the Bitcoin that he had been previously introducing people to as digital cash had been hijacked by a combination of The deep state and traditional finance, and it morphed into this completely different thing.
Now it's digital gold.
Now it's slow and expensive.
You're never supposed to use it for transactions.
You're not even supposed to have it in your own custody.
Completely 180 view of what it was supposed to be, what was outlined in the white paper.
But conveniently, just a few months after BlackRock starts selling an ETF, And politicians start getting involved in the promotion of Bitcoin.
Roger gets arrested in Spain, thrown in the same prison that John McAfee died in.
And he's been there now for seven months, awaiting extradition.
He can't leave, and he has to check in every other day.
And he's facing 109 years.
And again, he paid his taxes.
And so basically what they've done is they've gone after him retroactively.
They've said...
In 2014, there were no clear rules on Bitcoin.
The IRS didn't even know.
Is it a currency?
Is it an asset?
How do you value it?
And in 2014, the largest exchange, Mt.
Gox, had gone under.
And so there was no liquidity anyway.
So based on the formula that they have for calculating how much you have to pay, well, if Roger had sold all of his Bitcoin, it would have crashed the market.
I mean, essentially, Bitcoin would have dropped to zero.
Now they're going after him retroactively and saying, hey, you didn't pay enough.
Because you filed your tax return and sent it in the mail, and we're saying you didn't pay enough and you lied about that, that's 20 years right there.
You add up all these charges, it's 109 years.
They've given him no ability to settle.
They haven't even said how much he owes.
They haven't given him the ability to rectify the situation.
And he's essentially been silenced.
And he's now he's seven months into his stay there, knowing that McAfee was there for eight months.
And when McAfee exhausted all of his extradition options, he ended up dead one year after, I mean, excuse me, one day after his final appeal was denied.
So this, When I interviewed Tracy about this, she said that U.S. authorities also raided the offices of his attorney.
Which violates attorney-client privilege.
And they then swept up all kinds of texts and communications, maybe emails, who knows, between Roger and his attorney.
And even then, there was nothing damning.
There was no conspiracy to defraud.
It was simply, like you said, there was no liquidity in the Bitcoin market at that time.
And the proper way to calculate the value of your assets is to pretend like you're selling them all.
Yep.
Basically, you have to run a simulation of what would happen if you sold this.
Like, if you owned 10 hotels, and you said, well, if I were to sell these 10 hotels all at the same time, what would I be able to get for them?
And then you pay tax on that, right?
So that's what Roger Ver did, but like you said, they haven't even told him what he did wrong or how much they claim that he owes, so this is selective persecution.
Well, and he hired the top firms to conduct the evaluation analysis to figure out how much it should be.
And his attorneys filed a motion to dismiss last week.
And all of the emails are actually posted on freerogernow.org.
You can actually see the interactions between Roger and his accountants and lawyers where he was trying to comply with and was trying to get information from professionals about the proper way To value these Bitcoin.
It is freerogernow.org.
Sorry to interrupt.
Freerogernow.org.
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, there is a link to motion to dismiss under help out.
If you click on that, that gives you a summary of The motion to dismiss, an overview of the motion to dismiss.
I thought it was clever.
They filed for a hearing date on January the 6th.
I thought that was clever.
This gives a summary of the motion to dismiss, and then you can actually download and see the emails showing Roger's interaction with his lawyer.
Perfect.
So they violated his attorney-client privilege, but then to make things worse, what they violated shows that he was trying to comply with the law.
So this is a completely fabricated case.
They made things up and lied.
To even get the grand jury to begin with.
The case never should have happened.
But it's all politically motivated.
Because, again, this is where the intersection with me, why this is such an important issue to me.
What is the IRS? The IRS is a collections agency for the Federal Reserve.
You know, the Federal Reserve controls and is working on actively three CBDCs.
I'll separately say later that we already have a CBDC, but there's an enhanced CBDC that they want to roll out.
And Roger getting millions of people to adopt Bitcoin.
And then exposing that Bitcoin had been hijacked and then pushing people to privacy coins like Zeno and Monero that can't be stopped or tracked by the government, that makes him a threat, that makes him a target, and that is the cause for the actions that they're taking against Roger, which is why he needs to be defended at all costs.
Absolutely.
We are right there with you.
Go ahead, Todd.
Aaron, so what do you think...
Are the chances that President Trump unilaterally pardons Roger or the incoming DOJ drops all of these egregious charges against him?
I think they're very high.
And the reason is that there is a group of people that are not going to stop and we're going to do everything that we can to raise awareness on this issue.
And I actually think that, you know, I haven't always been a Trump fan, but in this particular case, if you there are several things The zeitgeist is moving in the right direction here.
If you think about Trump, Trump has had exactly similar experiences to Roger.
Trump is repeatedly audited.
His attorney-client privilege with Michael Cohen was breached.
So it's not only they're both cases of lawfare, but it's actually the same kind of lawfare, and it's emanating from the same institutions, and it is intended to use the state to suppress political speech in both cases as well.
So I actually think Trump will resonate with this.
I also think that because Trump has taken a big interest in In Bitcoin, Roger earned the nickname, he doesn't like it himself, but he earned the nickname Bitcoin Jesus because of how much he evangelized Bitcoin.
Well, Trump is out there saying that he wants the United States to lead the way in crypto, lead the way in Bitcoin.
Well, you can't lead the way in Bitcoin while, you know, crucifying Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Jesus is in prison.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't do that.
And so to me, the challenge is, Can we get this story out there fast enough?
Because we saw what happened.
I was at the Libertarian Party convention when Trump announced that he was going to commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence, which was phenomenal news.
And I met his mother 10 years ago.
She is phenomenal.
She is a case study, by the way, in what one person can do in terms of If you care and you just stick with it, you can make things happen.
Well, you know, Angela McArdle, who is the chair of the Libertarian Party, who helped make that happen, she's helping out with this Free Roger initiative and has access there.
And there are several other people, Tracy, and there's a whole group of people, of friends of Roger from all over the world that are doing everything that they can to help.
And so I actually think, again, the circumstances are right.
Normally a president pardons at the end of their term, but we already know Walking into this, Trump just said two days ago, on day one, he's going to pardon J6ers.
We already know he's going to pardon Ross on day one.
So in my opinion, this is just a matter of elevating this and getting this in front of him so that Rogers added to the list.
So I'm actually pretty confident if we keep up the pressure, it will happen.
And also, Aaron, you know, Todd and I are on Roger's side here as well, big time, and I'm continuing to mention this more frequently.
As I learn more about the case, I'm even more outraged.
But I also want to mention that the day that Joe Biden pardoned Hunter, I celebrated.
I celebrated.
Because I really don't care what happens to Hunter.
But by doing that, Joe just gave Trump a much bigger Overton window of pardons.
Amen.
I agree with that.
Nobody can criticize Trump legitimately if Trump pardons 100 people.
Especially, by the way, Joe Biden is about to pardon freaking Fauci before he's out of, and a whole bunch of maybe Collins and others that ran the NIH or the NIAID. There's going to be a pardon list that is so massive that if Trump doesn't match the list, then he's missing an opportunity.
Look, I'm okay with Biden pardoning Roger as well.
I don't want to just say that this is a Trump-only thing.
Maybe Biden also does it.
I would welcome that too.
I don't care how it happens, but you're right.
There's no political cost for Trump to pardon Roger.
It helps him on the crypto side.
The more you dig into the Roger case, again, I dropped everything that I was doing To actually focus on this once I realized how bad it was.
So when it first happened, when Roger was first thrown in prison, I was actually shocked.
And by the way, I've been talking about CBDCs and the fact that Biden under executive order one four zero six seven has been cracking down on crypto.
So other people were being arrested.
People with, you know, coin mixing services that make crypto private were going to prison.
The SEC was going after everything.
But even I was shocked that Roger was arrested.
And then once I dug into it, when he got out on bail, I thought, oh, you know what?
He'll settle this and this will be done in a couple of weeks.
So I thought the worst of it's over, Think about what's happened.
FTX settled a multi-billion dollar tax liability for pennies on the dollar.
This is Sam Bankman free.
This is an actual crypto scam involving money laundering, involving politicians.
That is actually a legitimate scam.
Billions of dollars settled for pennies on the dollar.
Surely, There's already a precedent here.
There's no possible way that Roger, they're actually going to continue to pursue.
They're just trying to extort him, right?
It's just that they're going to come at him with a number.
And then lo and behold, months go by and it became clear to me this has nothing to do with even collecting taxes.
This is all about stifling his speech because not only did Roger just write this book exposing hijacking Bitcoin, Three weeks before he was arrested, three days before he was arrested, he was speaking at a huge crypto conference in the UAE called Token 2049, and he was speaking about privacy tokens and the importance of privacy tokens as a way to stop central bank tyranny.
So that was three days before he was arrested.
There is no...
I mean, that is not a coincidence.
So it's very clear what's happening.
So Aaron...
I was just going to say, Aaron, a lot of people call me Tadradamus because I have such highly acute predictive power.
And what I'm seeing is that President Trump is going to pardon Roger, and he is going to put him as head of the SEC. How great would that be?
Yeah.
That would be fun.
But there have been signals that the SEC is going to completely recalibrate its categorization of tokenized assets.
I guess we have to wait and see what happens there.
But in the meantime, though, Aaron, talk to us about if Roger is pardoned, of course he's going to become, I think, a strong advocate for decentralization, which human freedom depends, I believe, on decentralization.
But he's not the only voice any longer by a long shot, right?
I think my point is, even if they silence Roger, and let us pray that they don't succeed in doing that, they can't silence the movement that Roger really spawned.
Right?
Well, they can't.
I mean, I've been for the last, this is what I've been doing.
I mean, I've been going around the country, and then next year, literally around the world, I've got two trips in Mexico, Europe, all over the place, where I'm doing these workshops, and I'm teaching people about how to actually use these privacy coins for day-to-day transactions.
They can't stop the entire movement.
And in fact, one of the other things that I've been doing is I've been promoting Xano, which Roger introduced me to when I interviewed him three weeks prior to his arrest, which was the project that he thought was the most promising in terms of actually finally delivering on this idea of peer-to-peer digital cash.
So since then, since we last met, I've completely met with The entire Zeno team.
I've met with them all in person.
I've been using Zeno.
I've gone through the white paper and everything else.
I've really gotten to know the team and the project.
I'm not going to stop.
I'm going to continue Going all out and have actually been trying to work with others and build alliances and again to get different privacy coins to work together and to help make the tools better.
So I'm now working with Cake Wallet, which is a very easy to use wallet that was originally built for Monero.
They're adding Zeno.
In fact, I've been testing it so it actually already works.
It just hasn't been rolled out yet.
That should be rolled out By the end of the year, NowPayments is a point-of-sale system that will have Zeno integrated.
There is a marketplace that is being built.
Showing Zeno's price action here.
Well, the price action, I mean, you know, when I started talking about it in May, it was $0.02.
And it's now, you know, $12.
And, you know, I don't want to talk about, like, price, you know, because people...
It's not about price, although price certainly does matter, but this is a technology that can be used to create privacy tokens to tokenize other assets and make them private.
And so CBDCs are a form of tokenized money.
That's basically what it is.
And the way that central banks are tokenizing money is in a way where it's not transparent.
Where they have control from the top down, where they can track the money, they can program the money, and they can censor the money.
What people don't realize is that they are also building a platform where they can apply that same surveillance tokenization to all of our assets.
So our stocks, our bonds, our homes, our cars, everything is going to be tokenized on the same platform with CBDCs.
Xano allows you to actually create privacy tokens Where it's the exact opposite of that, where you are in control of your own assets and you can trade those assets, and that information is not available publicly for anybody to look at, whether they're competitors in a business situation or the government.
This is why, to me, this is the most important technology.
I'll give you a couple of use cases.
One that was announced today is called Confidential Layer.
It actually allows you to take your Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash and make those private.
So you can essentially bridge your Bitcoin and your Ethereum and your Bitcoin Cash into Zeno and then make that private and then use Zeno's privacy.
It's like a privacy wrapper?
It's like a privacy wrapper.
And the fee to do this is like 0.3%.
So it's It's incredibly low relative to any kind of DeFi solutions or anything out there.
And it's built just for this.
It will allow you to then swap.
You'll be able to take an Ethereum token and convert it to a different blockchain using this technology.
So this is a huge announcement.
That's just one application, though.
You could use this.
I'm actually working on right now something called Karma.
I haven't Really publicly announced this.
So it'll be launched next year.
It is a gold-backed privacy stablecoin.
No, no way.
That's my dream come true.
Yeah, it is.
Please continue.
Well, so here's what happened.
So as I've been going around the country talking to merchants and I've been saying, listen, you know, you know CBDCs are coming, or at least you do after you've heard my doom pitch on this.
And of course, every small business knows that the dollar has lost 25-40% of its purchasing power just since COVID. So people know the dollar is evaporating.
However, when you ask them about taking crypto, their biggest concern is the volatility of the price.
Right.
Absolutely.
As a merchant.
As a merchant.
And so what I came up with is, so the idea is, So let's take this example.
You're a retailer and you can now accept multiple cryptocurrencies.
You can take Monero, you can take Ethereum, you can take Bitcoin, whatever it is.
But there's a swap that happens behind the scenes and you get paid in a gold-backed privacy stablecoin that you can actually convert for physical metal, but that is separate from state.
So in other words, it's a decentralized network of vaults in different countries Where there's an actual auditable wallet so that you can track the actual gold supply, but you can actually physically redeem this token for physical metals if you wish.
Now, my assumption is once they trust it enough, people are probably not going to want to do that, but you always have the ability to do that.
Well, I'm going to do that on Zeno.
And basically, the fees are going to be like two cents.
The transaction fees will be two cents.
Wow.
And it'll have the privacy features of Monero, but backed by gold.
That, to me, solves a huge portion of the problem that we have with adoption.
And I've talked to multiple merchants, and I've actually been helping to onboard merchants, and people are waiting for this.
And how quickly, though, usually merchants are waiting for confirmations, right?
So talk to us about the time required for a transaction to be trusted.
I would argue that it depends on...
If you're using a point-of-sale system like NowPayments, I would argue you should probably only use...
Select is your cryptocurrencies that you take, cryptocurrencies that have fast confirmation times and low fees to begin with.
So I actually wouldn't recommend people use Bitcoin.
I use that as an example, but I would recommend that people use Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or coins that actually resolve fairly quickly.
And so, I mean, it's nearly instant.
I've been using now payments for years, and so it's nearly instant from the standpoint of The transaction actually taking place from the consumer perspective, there may be a slight delay in terms of the swap happening for, you know, how long it takes for you to have your Bitcoin cash converted to this privacy-backed stablecoin.
But I mean, it's like, maybe it's 10-15 minutes, but you don't really care, right?
Because today, if you're dealing with credit cards, you're waiting two to three days.
So...
If you have to wait 15 minutes for the ultimate conversion, it's not like the consumer's waiting for the transaction for 15 minutes.
You're just waiting for the settlement as the merchant, and that might take 10 or 15 minutes, which is better than the two to three days that you currently get through the fiat system.
Yeah, but I'm referring to the time required for the merchant to be able to trust that the customer has made the payment.
Not the clearing time, but the time to know that it's been done.
I mean, that happens, again, depending on which blockchain you pick, that happens fairly instantly.
I mean, with like Xano, if you're talking about this gold-backed, I guess it's a Xano-wrapped token or something.
I'm just curious how fast could that...
Oh, it's literally a Xano token.
So it works just like Xano itself.
There's no smart contract.
So the beauty of Xano...
You can download a wallet at xano.org right now, and you can create your own token without a smart contract in less than a minute, literally.
And it costs, I think, 0.1 xano, which today would be $1.20.
And then you have your own token.
So you name the token.
You say you want it to be decentralized TV token, and you decide what you want the supply to be.
And then you press a button and boom, now you have a token that you can distribute.
And it has the very same properties and it is treated exactly the same as the native Zeno coin itself.
This is the power of this platform.
This is why I'm so excited about this technology because I can tokenize gold.
They're using it to tokenize Bitcoin, Ethereum, again, in the future, stocks, bonds, everything.
Money only makes up 5% of global assets, and so Xano will actually allow you to tokenize all assets, including money.
Right, right.
Todd, who did we interview from Xano?
I was just trying to think.
I didn't want to be rude.
I was going to go searching on my notes.
I can't remember who.
It was the top guy, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, Andre.
I think you interviewed Andre.
It might have been Andre and Pavel, but definitely I remember Andre was on there.
Is he the guy who did CryptoNote?
He's the guy that did CryptoNote.
That's the guy.
Yes.
That's who we interviewed.
Okay.
Very cool.
Yeah, Andre Sebelnivkov or...
Yeah, I remember...
That's a guy that's so smart that it's hard to translate into just...
How do you get that guy to talk to our audience?
So, Pavel Nikienkov, right?
He's one, and then the other is...
I have Andre and Sevil Nivkov.
Okay, anyway.
But then I have Pavel.
So yeah, all those.
Those guys.
And I've met these guys now in person.
I've worked with Pavel.
I actually, on a regular basis, because they've been helping me with...
We give people Zeno, we give people Monero, and so he's helped me to kind of automate the process of giving a whole bunch of people Zeno at once.
So I've worked with these guys.
These guys are the real deal.
And Andre's been working on basically the technology behind Zeno for 10 years.
And so this is real tech.
The big challenge with this is it's not a meme coin.
It's actually real technology that you have to...
It took me a long time to fully...
I mean, to read and reread the white paper and then to go through.
There are so many innovative elements to this that now I'm actually going to help them.
Because now that I've picked it to do this Stablecoin, I'm actually going to do a series of videos that explain why I picked Zeno so that I can help educate the market on the broader use cases of tokenization.
Because unfortunately, in crypto, if you say tokenization, what pops up for people is, oh, you're talking about a mean coin or you're talking about an NFT. And the thing is...
The technocrats are tokenizing literally all real world assets and people in crypto are talking about hotdog token or hawk token or whatever it happens to be.
But make no mistake about it, everything will be tokenized.
The question is, is it tokenized centrally where a small group of people can program and censor everything?
Or is it tokenized in a way that's completely decentralized and private where we own all of our own assets?
Xano's the solution if you like the latter of those two choices.
100%.
So Xano's like the anti-CBDC solution for humanity.
It's the anti-CBDC. And again, Roger was arrested three...
People actually often ask me, why do you think he was arrested?
And my answer is...
So if you look at the top three cryptos by market cap, a lot of people don't know this.
So...
There's Bitcoin, there's Ethereum, and there's XRP. Roger was the co-founder of XRP. Roger was the first investor in XRP. Roger has invested in 40 companies that are listed on his website.
I know personally of 10 others that aren't listed on the website.
And he's invested in multiple privacy coins.
And by the way, when he says he was the first investor in the Bitcoin ecosystem, literally, for a lot of these projects, he was literally the very first investor.
There was nobody else, so he would come in and...
And by the way, I'm not a huge fan of XRP, but when Roger invested in it, the people that are running XRP now were not there when Roger invested in it.
Roger invested in this other guy.
Who then has also left XRP and started something called Stellar Lumens.
But the thesis for Roger was, oh, XRP could basically be peer-to-peer digital cash without the environmental impact of proof-of-work mining.
That was the thesis for Roger.
Roger's always been about peer-to-peer digital cash, and he's always been about choice in the marketplace.
And so he's lived that.
I can't even tell you Since I've been trying to raise awareness since May and going around traveling with people, it's just amazing how many projects he's invested in or also people he's helped and causes that he's helped that are pro-liberty.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
He's the largest funder of legal fees for Ross Ulbricht.
He actually funded part of WikiLeaks.
He was the founding donor of the Brownstone Institute.
He donated money to fee.
He's donated money to antiwar.com.
He has donated money to countless people that aren't on any list anywhere because he's not doing it for the appreciation.
He helped people during COVID that lost their jobs and lost their livelihood and lost their income.
He is truly a hero of promoting liberty, voluntary interaction, and he has been a thorn in the side of the state because he will back up people What a legacy.
Let's talk for a moment about the hijacking of Bitcoin, something that Roger has spoken about.
I know you've talked about this somewhat.
Todd and I both have a lot of concerns about how Bitcoin has become very institutionalized.
People are not following self-custody, by and large.
You know, ETFs launched, and now there's all this talk out there.
You know, what Michael Saylor said the other day sounded insane to me.
He said the U.S. government should sell all its gold and use the money to buy Bitcoin and have a Bitcoin reserve and no gold.
I'm like, wow, history proves that to be a crazy thing.
But those are my thoughts.
I think Todd agrees with most of that.
But Aaron, what do you say about Bitcoin?
Because it has changed.
You mentioned some of this earlier.
It's not the same as what it used to be.
Well, I'll say this.
If the US government actually has gold, because we can sell audits, then you know what?
My stablecoin will buy it.
That's fine.
Proceed with that.
So when I first started using Bitcoin in 2012, I started using it as peer-to-peer digital cash.
I actually used it for transactions.
And here in New Hampshire, where I live, there were stores.
The Free State Project itself was taking Bitcoin for Tickets for our events to things like Porkfest going back to 2012. There was a retail shop called the Bitcoin Shop in Portsmouth, where it was literally just a retailer that sold a variety of different items, just a general retail store, and it only took cryptocurrency.
And so this is what most people from 2010 to 2015 thought Bitcoin was, because actually that's what the white paper says it's supposed to be, and people were really excited about that.
And by 2017, it was really gaining momentum.
You had retailers like Overstock.com, Microsoft, Expedia, Steam, all taking Bitcoin directly.
No intermediaries.
You literally could go to Overstock.com or Microsoft and scan a QR code and send your Bitcoin and pay for things.
And at that time, just as it started to become successful and adoption was growing, a group of people, developers, and this whole process that Roger and Steve Patterson outlined in Hijacking Bitcoin decided to keep it artificially slow and expensive.
In the original design, Bitcoin, there were no limits.
There was no block size limit.
The whole idea in Satoshi, who's the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, had stated from the very beginning, Bitcoin from the jump was designed to compete with MasterCard and Visa.
Not 10 years from now, but kind of on day one.
But as they were testing the original network, he was persuaded to put in a temporary block size limit of one megabyte.
What that means is, and the way Bitcoin works is, it is a blockchain.
It's an immutable ledger.
And every 10 minutes, new transactions are added to that ledger.
So you have computers all over the world solving complicated math problems.
The first computer to solve the math problem adds the next block of transactions.
And then they get a mining reward for this.
And so that reward was 50 Bitcoin back when this started.
Wow.
And it cuts in half every four years.
And the whole purpose of the block reward was an incentive to encourage miners to start mining and to build the security of the network.
But then after a while, the block reward goes away.
The way miners make money and sustainably continue to mine is because there would be millions of transactions in these blocks every 10 minutes.
Well, what they did was they decided to artificially cap to keep this one megabyte cap so that there will never be more than seven transactions per second.
So there's never going to be a situation where miners are going to be able to make a sustainable living just mining transactions if you're only doing seven transactions per second.
And so in essence, Bitcoin has become kind of like a technocratic enterprise.
If you look at technocracy, if you look what the UN and the WEF is trying to do, they're trying to create a single digital currency based on energy credits.
Energy credits are just it's manufactured scarcity where you're creating this limited thing where here are the carbon credits and now this is the new currency.
And lo and behold, the only people that happen to own the carbon credits are the people that got a head start knowing that the system was coming.
Right.
So they're buying forest.
They're buying land.
They're basically buying up the new currency.
That's exactly what these developers did with Bitcoin.
They said, we're going to keep it small and we're going to add fees.
I won't get into the technical details, but something called replace by fee.
So you keep the block size small.
And then if you want your transactions to happen faster, then you have to pay more.
Well, it got to the point by the end of 2017 where...
It would cost $50 in transaction fees and it would take literally 10 days to complete a transaction.
That was in the peak bottleneck.
It's backed off since then, but I remember that time.
It was crazy.
Well, it's backed off since then because nobody uses Bitcoin for transactions.
Nobody uses it as a medium of exchange.
The last report that I saw from a few months ago from the Federal Reserve Only.5% of Americans used cryptocurrency to actually buy something for day-to-day trade.
That is down from a couple of years ago where it was 2%.
So literally, the use case for Bitcoin as money that you use has completely crumbled.
To the point where just this week, we've had both the chair of the Federal Reserve and the head of the Treasury say, oh, well, you know, Bitcoin is not a threat to the dollar.
It's digital gold.
And now everybody's out there celebrating.
Oh, yeah, it's digital gold because Michael Saylor was out there saying it should be digital gold.
Here's the problem.
And by the way, you know, where Roger's book ends, mine picks up.
So the same people That funded the solidified the changes in Bitcoin to make it slow and expensive to kind of freeze and ossify this one megabyte cap.
They funded all three U.S. CBDC pilots.
So at the same time, people were buying into this digital gold narrative.
They created a system that can do 1.8 million transactions per second.
The United States retail CBDC pilot program called Project Hamilton, It does 1.8 million transactions per second versus Bitcoin that is still stuck at seven, but it gets even worse.
There's actually a developer, a Bitcoin core developer, that worked on Lightning Network and SegWit and some of these changes to Bitcoin and the Bitcoin narrative.
He's a co-author of Project Hamilton.
He is a co-author of the U.S. Retail CBDC Project, a Bitcoin core developer.
So this thing was absolutely hijacked.
Then a group of developers left and started a company called Blockstream.
And Blockstream makes money selling what are called second layer solutions.
So they make money selling solutions Right.
Right.
So there's no doubt about this.
And in this book, Roger talks about a guy named John Dillon, who had ties to the intelligence agencies.
He's the one who actually funded the Bitcoin developer to integrate this replace by fee concept to make the transactions expensive.
So there was one guy, Luke Dash Jr., who made the block sizes small and made the capacity small, and another guy who drove up the cost of the transactions.
That guy was funded by somebody with ties to the intelligence agencies who explicitly stated that he did not want Bitcoin to be used as a currency.
So you're describing a cabal.
You're describing a control system to prevent Bitcoin from becoming what Satoshi originally envisioned.
Yes, a cabal.
And boy, have they won.
And now people are celebrating.
But here's the alarming thing.
When I do these workshops...
More people certainly have heard of Sam Bankman-Fried than Satoshi Nakamoto, but actually, more alarmingly, when I ask people what they think Bitcoin is used for, most people have never even heard of the use case of it being something that you use as a currency.
Most people only know of it as a store of value.
So once you get outside of kind of our bubble or outside of the liberty or crypto space...
And by the way, these are people that are showing up to a talk that I'm giving or actually going to a workshop.
So I wouldn't even say these are average people.
These are people that are already...
Awake enough that they want to learn more about this.
And even that group, I'm telling you that it's like, because I do a little poll, it's like 95% are unaware of the fact that you could even have ever used Bitcoin.
They don't know what happened in 2017. They have no idea.
That's wild.
Yeah, this is truly, truly the state.
And so think about this.
So as this is going on, I was living through this at the time because I'm trying to figure out, okay, I'm doing these workshops.
What am I proposing to people?
What am I going to have people use?
This is when Roger puts out his book.
The book was starting to get a lot of traction.
I was fortunate enough to be able to interview him on my podcast.
My podcast doesn't have a very big audience, but I was able to interview him about Hi-jacking Bitcoin.
And I actually posted a short review about it.
Very short review.
In fact, I just said, hey, look, I'll give you a fuller review later, but you should really check this book out.
And almost every single Bitcoin Core developer blocked me on the basis of that post.
So these people do not want a debate.
Roger talks in the book about part of the hijacking itself.
and censorship that happened at the time because it was a very contentious situation to make the decision not to increase the block size.
That was a very, very, very contentious decision.
And a lot of the tactics that were used were propaganda and censorship.
Well, what do you think being stuck in Spain basically gagged out on bail facing 109 years is?
That is the ultimate in censorship and propaganda.
Because most of the story so far, except for a few of us, until recently, I was one of the only people talking about Roger for the last few months.
And so people would read the headlines and it would be whatever the DOJ indictment says.
And of course, the mainstream media is just going to pick up a press release.
And so you would have completely wrong information about Roger.
And so not only are they casting him in a completely inaccurate light, he's not able to get this critical information out about Bitcoin being hijacked just as people are, you know, I know somebody that was telling me the other day that their company was having a meeting where they were going to bring in a financial advisor to try to explain I know somebody that was telling me the other day that their company was having a meeting where Oh my.
Yeah, there's no custody in that.
Now, you created a song.
Is it called Free Roger Now?
Or what's the name of the song?
I created one called Free Roger Now.
I'm actually creating a whole album, but there's Free Roger Now, and then there's a rap song.
Okay.
So they're two different songs.
All right.
So now you use AI Tools to create this song, which I think is really amazing.
And I also use AI Tools to do the music video for one of my recent songs.
I've done rap music, actually, for a long time.
I did a rap song in 2008 that was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal called, I Want My Bailout Money.
And that's long before AI, but that was just me screaming into a microphone about more bailout money.
But you use an AI tool.
I want to play that music video here for our audience, so we'll just insert it here.
So just pause for a second.
We'll be right back.
doing it again First investor in the game, now they want to kill his flame.
Hired lawyers did it right, still they want to pick a fight.
Core devs changed the protocol.
Government wants total control.
Attorney, client, privilege, dead.
Using compliance plans instead, yeah.
First investor in the game, now they want to kill his flame.
Hired lawyers did it right, still they want to pick a fight.
Core devs changed the protocol.
Government wants total control.
Attorney, client, privilege, dead.
Using compliance plans instead.
Yeah.
Free fear.
Free fear.
Blockstream got their way back then.
One make blocks, remember when.
Big blocks meant decentralized.
Small blocks kept us paralyzed.
Now they're coming for the king.
Using laws like puppets raised.
Spanish prison, McAfee died.
Making sure Veer stays inside.
They can raid the lawyers.
What?
They can seize the files.
Yeah.
But they can't stop crypto.
Nah.
Running wild, running wild.
Brownstone dropping truth bombs daily.
System going crazy lately.
Trying to lock up Bitcoin, Jesus.
But they cannot defeat us.
Fear saw freedom in the code.
Now they wanna block his road.
But the movement's too damn strong.
And this persecution's wrong.
Free fear.
Down all nine years for following legal advice.
That's not justice.
That's a warning.
Free Roger Veer.
So coming back from the song Aaron.
Now, so whose voice is that?
I mean, is that just an AI-generated voice?
That's just an AI-generated voice.
It's amazing.
I mean, it took me about 50 versions to get to that, because, I mean, playing around with the AI, a lot of it is, I mean, I'm not particularly musical myself, so a lot of it is figuring out how to describe what the vocal should be like, describe what the style should be, and then playing around with the lyrics and everything else, and then even iterating and doing multiple...
Multiple versions of that.
And I really ended up liking that one.
And now I actually listen to it.
Now I kind of hum it and play it.
It's really a well done song.
I thought it was a human being singing it.
And now the lyrics, did you feed it in your prompt all the lyrics that you wanted or just kind of concepts for the lyrics?
Yeah.
I used a different AI for that.
I actually used Claude to help me with that.
I gave it a general framework of what the intent was that I was trying to do.
I tell it the intent and the very specific theme.
Obviously, 109 years, all of the factual information, I provided it.
You say what the style of music should be, and then Claude will actually take that style, and then it understands the intent of what you're trying to say, and so it'll actually change the words.
So for instance, I would play around with different styles.
So there's the style of the song that you ultimately had, but I played around with...
Kind of do it in a pentatonic style, do it in a rap style.
I ended up experimenting with different things, tried doing a tabernacle choir mixed with this.
And so when you give it the different styles, it'll actually generate different lyrics that are appropriate for that style of music.
And so then it really is eye-opening.
And you learn a lot about music, actually, just trying to piece all of this stuff together.
Oh, that's amazing.
I'm so glad that you used that tool.
I think that's the best song that I've heard out of AI, so thank you for doing that.
Good job.
Yeah, and let me just mention, too, I've been working, you know, our website, brighteon.ai, we're going to be releasing a new model Next year, free open source model.
Folks, you can sign up on the website to be alerted via email.
And Aaron, we spent about a year doing data pipeline preparation and data normalization for this.
We have the largest repository of LLM training data for natural health, nutrition, off-grid, survival, living, permaculture, emergency medicine.
We have the largest in the world.
At this point.
And we have all the Python scripts for pipeline processing and normalization.
So now we are in the process of training some really advanced new models using some super advanced techniques to freeze certain layers of the model and only train the other ones of high GPU efficiency methods.
We're releasing that next year and I don't think people have any idea how freaking good AI just got in the last six months.
They don't know.
So could you talk about that?
Because what I just did on my computer this morning freaked me out.
They would have taken a human being a thousand hours to do what I did in five minutes.
I swear.
But Aaron, talk about AI if you would, please.
I was actually just watching an update video this morning.
And I'm stunned.
There's a complete arms race going on right now.
And it turns out, I think Elon Musk is about to leapfrog with this Grok 3 model.
In fact, just before jumping on here, I watched a video about where he's figured out how to basically network 100,000 GPUs together and get coherence.
The idea behind coherence is the ability to sync up And to have, you know, basically all 100,000 cards, you know, have the same state at the same time, which is something that people thought wasn't possible.
Yeah, the memory-sharing bandwidth shouldn't be possible.
He basically used physical Ethernet cables, and so this is something that people actually did not expect to be able to happen.
So this Grok3 It's supposed to be over the top.
But then just in the last week, I think, ChatGPT has gone through their 12 days of Christmas or whatever it is, and then they unveiled their new ChatGPT 01 model, which has a lot of additional capabilities and a lot more reasoning.
They had kind of a trial version of it.
Now the full version of it is out.
But then the thing that baffled me, because I stopped using it after a while, but now I'm going to take a look again, Google's Gemini is actually, as of today, the most powerful of the AI models.
I stopped using it based on how woke it was, but I'll give it another shot.
But I've also been looking at, in addition to the music, okay, how can you take the music and turn it into a video?
And so there are a whole slew of different video AI capabilities, including the ability for you to train it on your own face and basically where you can put somebody else's voice in there.
And if you give it enough, you know, Give it the side, the front, and enough kind of video footage, it can basically create an avatar that you can plug into a movie and into different situations and different settings.
Absolutely.
But, Aaron, I'm sorry to interject here, but very important for our conversation, and we're almost out of time.
I want to be respectful of your time.
But about decentralization, I have noticed in the last six months the open-source models that you can download and run locally for local inference on prosumer GPUs, It has really closed the gap with the big centralized models.
The future of AI is going to be, I hope, I believe, widespread decentralized adoption of open-source AI models that are customized, that are merged, that are distilled, that are customized on certain domain knowledge, such as what we do, herbs, natural health, and nutrition, and so on.
But the NVIDIA graphics cards that are $1,000 are producing today what ChatGPT did 18 months ago or less.
That is huge.
That's a game-changer.
It is a game changer.
And it's very similar to crypto, right?
If you don't have possession of your own keys, it's not your crypto.
I think we're going to be moving into an era of self-custody AI. Yes.
You need to have your own, you know, have your own AI, use your own GPU and move towards the decentralization side of that.
But I tell you, that is the interesting battleground because I'm not necessarily a Peter Thiel fan by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought it was interesting, at least his take, that Bitcoin at least started out libertarian, but most of the AI projects are more communist or technocratic in nature.
And certainly the fact that Elon's doing something with 100,000 GPUs, well, certainly that's...
Nobody can...
Only nation states and the richest person on the planet can actually afford to do that.
This decentralized model...
It does have promise.
And in fact, we kind of need to commit to it if we want to be able to exist outside of the system.
You know, oftentimes you'll talk to people, and I reject this idea that we have to go back to Little House on the Prairie as kind of the lifestyle and just completely reject technology.
I don't think technology is inherently bad.
Certainly, the technocracy that moves towards globalization and one world government is bad.
But I think that we should be looking at, well, how do we use technology?
I agree.
I'm really glad that there's been a very strong open source community.
Hugging Face, for example, has been a big part of that.
And you've got France with a lot of amazing models like Mistral.
But also, if you want anti-woke models, China's producing the best anti-woke models, like Quinn, for example, right?
Yep.
Yeah, no, I was actually...
Yeah.
So, you know, now you can start to pick what culture you want in terms of your AI model.
And then with new technology, you can slap onto that a knowledge domain to really alter the worldview of the models, right?
Because there are, as you know, there are no such things as just consensus facts.
Every culture has its own set of facts, by the way, all throughout history.
And so do people.
But anyway, We could go on forever about this, but fascinating stuff.
Todd, do you want to wrap it up here with a question?
Yeah, sure.
I would just like to spend a couple of minutes talking about cybersecurity.
How vulnerable is Bitcoin to quantum attacks?
A lot or a lot?
I actually don't know.
I just saw what Google announced, this Willow model.
And I have not had enough...
I actually didn't have time to...
It's on my list of things to review, because I've seen what other people have said about it, and of course...
People in Bitcoin have said, oh, well, this isn't really a threat because you would need to have this many qubits, and this is only this many qubits.
But I don't know what the actual facts are yet, so I need to study this a little bit more.
But certainly, quantum is a game-changer if done properly.
And there are people working on quantum-resistant blockchain technology.
But I do think that Bitcoin is stagnated.
So Bitcoin has a whole variety of different problems.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Bitcoin can be surveilled.
And it has been surveilled.
The United States government has 200,000 Bitcoin, not because they mined them or they bought them.
They were able to track because it's a public ledger and basically, you know, threaten people to say, hey, you either turn over these keys or spend the rest of your life in prison.
And so, you know, yes, while somebody could, you know, refuse to give up their keys, the government knows who owns those keys through this tracking.
And so what this means now is not every Bitcoin is the same.
Which means that Bitcoin isn't fungible, because one Bitcoin isn't the same as another Bitcoin.
Bingo.
We came to the same conclusion.
Yep.
And so this is a fundamental problem of Bitcoin.
So it's slow, it's expensive, and now you have Michael Saylor, as you mentioned earlier, saying...
We're not going to compete with the dollar, the euro, MasterCard, Visa.
And he's now going out and saying only anarchists and criminals basically want to self-custody their own crypto.
So he's basically saying that self-custody is a bad thing.
And so he actually has even promoted this idea.
His word that he was pushing was ossification, which is to basically freeze the development of Bitcoin.
So the way I look at Bitcoin is Bitcoin...
We took an artificial limit that was supposed to be for testing purposes and now they've frozen it and now they're freezing development.
So now it's slow, expensive and trackable.
So yeah, is it going to be quantum resistant?
Well, there's really no indication that the development community has been particularly resilient at all.
So I think it would be probably more vulnerable than most projects because of how difficult it is to even make changes at this point now that they've solidified this digital gold narrative.
Yeah, good point.
Well, Please keep us posted, Aaron.
And we will continue to advocate for Roger Veer.
And I just want to remind folks, the website here, freerogernow.org.
And we really want to encourage people, use the hashtag Freeroger.
And spread this all over social media right now.
We need to keep up knowledge about this and encourage Trump to give this due consideration.
We can't make demands of Trump, but we can ask him to consider this part and as a very important, critical...
Not just a gesture, but to achieve real liberty and justice for this man who has been wrongfully persecuted, but also to send a very strong signal to the crypto community that government-selective prosecution of crypto advocates will not be tolerated under the Trump administration.
So that's what we're calling for.
Yep, exactly.
I mean, put an end to the lawfare, allow innovation to flourish.
I think it's a great thing for him to do, and it's actually consistent with what his stated policies are.
So to me, again, this should be a no-brainer.
The other thing I would say is I invite people to send the link directly to people through Signal, Telegram, DM. So when you post a link on a social media platform, it immediately gets suppressed because all of these platforms want to keep the traffic on their site.
So it's actually very difficult to get a link to an external site to go viral.
So I found the way that I get the most people to actually sign the open letter is to send them direct messages.
Great idea.
All right.
Perfect point.
Well, Aaron, thank you so much for your time today.
Sorry we kept you over, but I lost track of time because of the fascinating nature of our discussion.
But thank you so much, Aaron.
Let me mention your website, also daylightfreedom.org.
Is that it?
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
And thank you for all that you do.
Thank you.
All right.
Appreciate you.
Yep.
Take care, Aaron.
Thank you.
Bye.
And then we'll take a break, folks.
We'll be right back after this break, Todd and I with the after party and maybe some AI rap songs, too.
We'll see.
We'll be right back.
All right.
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All right, welcome back, everybody.
And this is the after party.
We made it to the after party.
Yay!
Todd, once again, I gotta say that this show is so amazing.
I love having conversations with really smart people.
Yeah, really.
You learn so much.
Don't we?
Yeah.
Yes.
And, you know, Aaron Day gets it.
Like, he knows all the stuff that we know and more.
Privacy coins.
Like, you and I have been advocates of privacy coins from day one.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And he's really pointing out a lot of the problems with Bitcoin that even I wasn't thinking about.
Absolutely.
And we didn't have time to get into it with him, but I did want to share because I think people who are seeing all of the news now, the mainstream news about Bitcoin and all of a sudden the river has turned to where it's a really good digital asset.
And so if the Druid Babylonian bastards are supporting it, you have to kind of question why, right?
Well, let me share this.
Remember, Mike, McDonald's prior marketing campaign where they were running the total of how many burgers were sold?
I think they got up to over $60 billion sold.
Do you remember that?
I mean, they used to have that on the McDonald's signs.
Yeah.
On the signs, it would always go up.
And I remember over $60 billion sold at one point in time.
Well, did you know that the marketing genius behind that campaign now works for a major digital asset player?
No.
And I'll give you the new company tagline, and you tell me which company it is, okay?
Over 1.2 billion transactions surveilled.
Is that Bitcoin?
I mean, what?
No, it's Chainalysis.
Oh, Chainalysis.
Okay, yeah.
And there's that, and then he mentioned Blockstream, so they're competitors about being able to take the data that they can surveil.
Obviously, that was a joke, but I just want people to know I did look it up.
There have been 1.2 billion Bitcoin transactions and every one of them is surveilled by these two companies.
They know who sent it, how much it was, all the data is in the blockchain.
So you talk about it is a surveillance chain now.
That's why the powers that be, or should not be, that's why they would love for everybody to transact and And get familiar with Bitcoin, because you know what?
They can see everything you do.
And ultimately, when these unrealized gains, taxable unrealized gains, go into effect, they're going to have a party.
That's the thing, is that the government can buy Bitcoin, drive up the price, and then they can make you pay taxes online.
On the higher price as an unrealized gain.
And then they can sell it and rug pull.
Yes.
And put in a short position.
So you don't think this is all in the master plan?
It's another way to fleece the masses.
Yes.
Yes.
We're right there.
We're right there.
Yeah.
The rug pull, like you said, they'll do an 80% drop.
Yeah.
After everybody pays their taxes on the gains, then they'll do an 80% drop, and then people will panic sell, and then the government buys back in and just repeats the con.
Yeah, it's just a cycle.
And what's going to happen is people are going to be forced to sell when it retraces to be able to pay the higher taxes, right?
So it's just all a scam, man.
And I have said, I don't want to be part of a crypto project that government loves to be involved in and is buying into in big ways.
I think those ideas are contradictory.
We want decentralized systems of value.
Right.
Once it crosses that Rubicon of going institutional, you have to know that it's not out for the little guys anymore.
There's nothing decentralized about it, Mike.
Now, this doesn't mean that Bitcoin won't go to, you know, quarter of a million a coin or a million a coin.
It probably will.
Maybe it will.
But it's inflated by dollar currency printing.
I mean, the Federal Reserve prints dollars for free and then uses them to buy Bitcoin.
So they're essentially hyperinflating Bitcoin with dollars.
Yeah, and there is no 21 million supply with Bitcoin.
It's all been rehypothecated, especially once now it's just paper Bitcoin, right?
ETFs.
With the ETFs.
Yeah, exactly.
So people don't realize that.
From a store of value standpoint, you really can't count on the initial numbers go up technology, which it should be.
It just doesn't exist anymore within that digital asset.
Yeah, true.
So people should just be concerned and don't fall for the hype and don't go liquidating everything to get into Bitcoin during FOMO. Yeah, no kidding.
I know it crossed $100,000 a coin.
I don't know what it is today.
I don't track it.
But I still prefer Monero.
I mean, I've been a Monero fan since day one also.
I love all the privacy coins, but Monero is the most popular privacy coin, and I can buy Monero on Kraken, right?
Sure.
And then I can swap it for other things if I ever want to do that.
But to this day, Todd, I've never sold crypto for fiat.
Never.
Me neither.
Yeah, and I don't ever plan to.
I mean, I've spent fiat to buy crypto, and then I've kept it in the world of crypto.
And I'm sticking with that.
Why would I want dollars?
As a matter of fact, I jump every time somebody that I'm giving a consultation to about these UNAs, I jump at the opportunity when they say, hey, I'd like to do the private transaction.
Can I either pay you in precious metals or private crypto?
And I'm like, okay.
If you twist my arm.
You can keep your fiat.
You said that you had a funny story, actually.
I do.
Everybody, this is so funny, and I think everybody watching this is going to giggle just a little bit.
But this morning, I had a UNA consultation with this gentleman.
I don't know how old he is, but he's an older gentleman.
And his wife was in the background.
And I called because he submitted an order for a UNA, and before I processed it, I had a couple of questions on it.
So I called him out of the blue.
Now, he's a DTV viewer, right?
So it was kind of like back in the day when I first got a phone call from you, Mike, and I'm like, whoa, Mike, yeah, right?
Yeah.
I didn't know little old me might have a little bit of effect like that.
So when I called this guy, he was super excited to be able to talk to me.
He's like, what?
You're calling me?
Right?
Well, I wanted to call him about that.
So he yells to his wife.
He says, honey, get over here.
Get over here.
I want to put you on speaker.
It's the DTV guy.
I wrote it down.
She said, as she was walking over, I could hear her.
She says, which one is it?
First of all, Mike, before I share it, I just want to say...
Which one is it?
I think you are really, really cool.
I'm just saying that right now before I read it.
Uh-oh.
Is there some warning about what's coming?
Which one is it?
The cool one who asks the funny questions or the really smart one with the cool dog?
I got her on the phone and I'm like, whoa, wait a minute.
I'm smart too.
I have a cool dog.
And it was just, we had a funny laugh.
But that's great.
So you're the cool one.
Who asks funny questions.
Who asks funny questions.
Yeah.
That's great.
And I'm the guy with the dog.
Well, you're the smart one.
I'm the smart guy with the dog.
Yeah.
But that's why I said you're all so cool.
We'll totally take that.
We'll take it, but it was really interesting.
Well, thank you to the viewers who said that.
Yeah, we'll take that.
Yeah, it's better than them saying something hideous, like the one with bad hair or whatever.
But it was just cute.
It was fun.
It was a fun moment.
Yeah, that's cool.
But speaking of that, you mentioned UNA. Let me bring up your website.
Sure.
This is a service that you offer at my575e.com, correct?
That's right, yes.
All right, so tell us about this while I bring up the website and show people.
Well, what I would like to do at this point in time, you know, we've talked about it on other shows, and I just want to be a little more focused on this one because we're coming to the end of the year.
And people who are W-2 earners and 1099 earners are starting to take a look at what their tax consequence is going to be, their tax obligation.
So all I am going to share with everyone And you have to understand that, goodness, we are, I think, 75 folks that we've helped with these UNAs since I started talking about it on the show, Mike, which is amazing.
But all I ask, if you are a W-2 earner or a 1099 earner, Do yourself the favor and simply go to my575e.com, put in your name and email address, and that's all private.
That's just to be able to unlock the free private video that's 90 minutes where I interview Dennis Gray, who is the person who has forgotten more about these than I'll ever know for sure.
but he's 81 year old gentleman who has been helping people acquire these for 34 years.
He's helped over now 1100 people acquire them and just watch that interview.
And part of it, I created a, I believe it's like a 12 page PDF that is that, that you can print out.
And again, that's free to you print out while you're watching the video to take notes or whatever.
And you will be 95% up to speed on all of this.
And what happens when I reference the consultation, you have a lot of people who will go through this, they get it, they understand, but they have a few questions.
And so what I offer within the site is You could also book a consultation with me, and I want to be very clear with everyone.
It's $150 for the 30-minute consultation, but as I tell everybody who I get on the phone, I'm like, it's not about the $150, but Mike, do you know what percentage of no-shows there were when I did it free?
Yeah.
70%.
Yeah, free is not good.
So free, people don't respect free.
So I charge the $150, but all the people, when I have the consultations, they move forward with the UNAs, and I credit that back.
So I just say, take $150 off when you invest in it.
So the most they risk is $150 to learn about this.
Yeah, and then the other thing is, I tell them that the 30 minutes, there's no hard stop on that.
I stay on these calls.
As long as I need to, to be able to answer the question.
So anyway, that's all.
Just go to the website, watch the video, and then if you want to proceed, great.
But I don't sell them, Mike.
I present it, and people are big boys and girls, and they can make their own decisions.
But I'm telling you, if you are a 1099 or a W-2 earner, it is almost irresponsible to not go and just invest a little time to be able to know what's possible from a tax advantage standpoint.
Really good point, especially as we're coming up on year-end here.
A lot of things have to happen this calendar year, and there's time right now.
Yeah, there's time.
There's time.
You could get a UNA. You could make a large donation to it and take that.
And it's kind of going from your right pocket to your left pocket.
I'll explain all that.
You'll learn about that in the video.
So you still have the opportunity.
You'd have to be quick to be able to take advantage of it.
But more importantly, Mike, to me, it's about...
You acquire UNA and you have a full year to learn how to optimize it.
And people should know, once you do acquire it, you get invited to our private UNA group on Telegram.
Cool.
And man, it's a great group of people in there, Mike.
Okay.
We're learning together.
I love that.
Okay, so your website again is my575e.com.
All right.
And they just click that orange button that says let's go or get started or whatever, then boom, you're in.
Alright, now Todd, I've got something special here to show you.
Okay.
What is this creeping up onto camera?
Silverfish toothpaste!
Oh!
Talk to me!
Alright, so this is our new...
I know you're a big fan of our toothpaste and you were panicked that you were running out, or you did run out, or you're close to running out.
So this is our reformulated American-made toothpaste because the evil FDA blocked our imports of the Malaysian-made toothpaste.
So we reformulated and we're manufacturing it here in America.
It's got colloidal silver in it made from Texas rainwater, so it's now a Texas silver fresh toothpaste.
And this is going to be available.
It might be now or it might be in a week or a couple weeks, but it's coming.
In January, for sure.
So we will have this available at healthrangersstore.com.
Can we pre-order?
Can we pre-order?
I don't know.
Let me actually...
Yeah, pull it up.
If you can pre-order, man, this weekend, I'm putting my dibs in.
Okay, no, I'm told you cannot pre-order it, but we will have it available soon.
Okay, you just let me know, Mike.
HealthRangerStore.com, I will let you know, and thank you for being such a fan.
Show the screen if you would.
HealthRangerStore.com is the website.
Oh, yeah.
Now, Todd, I have five tubes here, and I'd be happy to give you some if there were a convenient way to do that.
I wish we could just email this to you, but...
Here, Mike.
Yeah!
Throw it at the camera.
So I just wanted to say that because I know you love this toothpaste, and thank you.
But our sponsor today is the Satellite Phone Store, SAT123.com, which has, of course, the satellite phones, but also they've got the new Faraday bags called Escape Zone Bags.
They have solar generators.
One of these ballistic backpacks actually has Faraday material in four different compartments, and they've got the bivvy sticks and, you know, of course, a couple of different satellite phone brands and so on.
They make it all very affordable on the sat phones.
Hey, Mike?
Yes.
Just for some people who may not be aware, can you just talk about the positive attributes of a Faraday bag?
What it is?
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
You put your mobile phone in it, and it blocks its signals to the cell towers.
So the government can't spy on you.
They can't surveil your location.
And remember, they arrested almost all the J6 people because of their cell phone location metadata.
Yep.
And if they had put their phones into Faraday bags, they would not be in prison.
Isn't that amazing?
And guess what, Mike?
January 6th coming up.
Yeah, and hopefully a bunch of pardons for the J6 people who were almost all just completely innocent, peaceful protesters.
And yeah, Trump needs a pardon.
Trump's pardon list needs to be big.
A lot of people who are wrongfully persecuted.
But anyway, the satellite phone store, sat123.com, is our sponsor.
And then also, Aaron Day mentioned Goldbacks.
And of course, we're big fans of Goldbacks here.
And I just got to mention something really cool about Goldbacks, Todd, is they've issued a Florida version of Goldbacks shipping in January.
They have?
Yeah, there's a whole Florida edition of the whole set.
Oh my gosh.
It's got new art.
In fact...
Can we pre-order those?
Yeah, I've got the Florida ones in my hands.
You can pre-order these.
You go to verifiedgoldbacks.com.
Let me bring that up.
Plug in all our sponsors now.
Verifiedgoldbacks.com right here.
And if you click on check goldback pricing here, you can pre-order the Florida edition.
And remember, there's real physical gold embedded in every goldback.
This is another form of decentralized value that's self-custody in your hands.
So how much does each one of those have in it so that, like, if you were handing it as a tip or something...
What would be the equivalent fiat?
So the one has one one-thousandth of an ounce of gold, literally, in it.
You know, we've done all the testing.
So if you go here and you check the current pricing, the goldbacks, because of the utility and the manufacturing, they cost about twice the spot gold.
Okay.
So this would be worth about like a little over $5 right now, something like that.
Oh, that's very cool.
Yeah.
That's very cool.
So it's a great tip.
I use these as tips and gifts and also farmer's markets.
A lot of people accept goldbacks and more and more people are learning about goldbacks and they have, you know, they come in fives.
These are all fives here.
And then, you know, tens and so on.
And then fifties, 51 thousandths of an ounce of gold.
Oh, so the one is one one-thousandth, the five is five one-thousandth?
You got it.
Right.
Okay.
So this has five one-thousandths of an ounce of gold in it.
This is a five.
How cool.
And it's got new Florida art.
So you could just go find the gold price.
Multiply it by what?
.0001, right?
Do I have that right?
Well, yes, but...
And then double that to get the rough price of what they are.
Okay.
What they're valued at today.
Or, actually, if you go to...
Let me bring up...
But if you explained it to someone at a farmer's market to say, look, I can take you through the math here.
This is how much this is worth from a fiat standpoint.
Would you accept this for this...
You know, bushel of whatever.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
So a lot of people love taking gold.
I bet.
Merchants, you know, farmers, what have you.
Some people...
Also accept, you know, silver.
So silver is something good to have on hand.
Some people accept Monero, you know?
Right.
So I think we should all have options, man.
Absolutely.
We should have like digital forms.
We should have physical forms.
We should have things that exist outside the system because the system is rigged and it's going to get rugged.
It's like rigged and then rugged and then you're screwed.
So have your assets, you know, outside the system to the extent that you can.
Take your assets!
Okay, good best attitude score for the day right there.
But that's about it, Todd.
I gotta say, I love our guest today, Aaron Day.
He's a rock star.
He gets it.
And Roger Veer.
Oh, remember that Roger, if he is pardoned, he's going to come on the show.
That's perfect.
Yeah, we could have Bitcoin Jesus on the show.
That's awesome.
Oh, man, I can't wait.
That's a dream.
We'll both have to quote scripture to him and see what he says.
You know, let's quote from Luke and Mark.
See, what would Bitcoin Jesus have done, you know?
Well, he gave us and then they took us away.
And then he pardoneth, and now he is freeth.
Resurrected.
He's resurrected.
The resurrection.
Yes.
That could very well happen.
Okay.
You know, that's the next book.
The resurrection of Roger Vergeer.
Of Bitcoin Jesus.
Yeah, Bitcoin Jesus.
Yeah, but he doesn't like the nickname, Bitcoin Jesus.
But sometimes you don't get to choose your nickname.
Let's hope he just giggles at the suggestion.
I think he's got a good sense of humor about it.
But it does require him to act Jesus-like if he's pardoned.
He's got to go full-on Jesus.
He's got to feed the poor, clothe the widows, all of it.
And you know, I put myself through college as a magician.
I know a lot of illusionists out there.
I can work with him, with some of the people that I know, where he can actually walk on water, Mike.
Oh, hey, that's a great idea.
Walking on water.
Bitcoin Jesus.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so that's the show today.
Awesome stuff, Todd.
Where else do you all get this kind of show?
I'm telling you, what we have here is really awesome.
We've been doing this show over a year and a half now, haven't we?
Yes, we have.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Love it.
Much more yet to come as well.
So thank you.
Thank you, Todd, for joining me today.
It's always a blast.
Always a blast.
Okay, and then I'm going to play for people my AI music video here.
Love it.
This is the 2008 video, right?
No, that's just a song without a video, but I do have God is With Us, which is a more recent video that's AI video.
I could play...
I could play I Want My Bailout Money.
Yeah, I'll ask my editors to find that and put in I Want My Bailout Money from 2008. Hey, you know what, Mike?
Speaking of resurrection, why don't you resurrect that song, use your AI abilities now, and create a video for it.
Hey, that's a great idea.
You have great ideas.
I will do that, maybe over Christmas or something.
That'll be fun.
Yeah, that'll be fun.
I Want My Bailout Money 2025 edition.
That's awesome.
I want my hyperinflated bailout money.
That's what it should be.
Oh, there you go.
Beautiful.
Perfect.
Okay.
I will resurrect that song.
And you can say, where's Bitcoin Jesus when I need him?
Okay.
Wait for the pardon.
All right.
All right.
I want my hyperinflated bailout money in 2025. There we go.
Perfect.
Love it.
Great.
All right.
Thank you, Tom.
Problem solved.
All right.
We'll see you, Mike.
All right.
Have a great day and thank all of you for watching here.
Decentralized.tv is the website to catch all the other episodes, including our previous interview with one of the top people, Zeno, and also a previous interview with Aaron Day and many other leaders in this space of privacy, crypto, decentralization, and I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, the free speech video platform, and thank you for watching today.
Take care.
I want my bailout money.
Keep the bills coming.
Sweet green cash just dripping like honey.
I'm a new kind of thug with the Washington buzz.
Cause dealing debt pays better than dealing drugs.
What if this will happen when they double the money supply?
A fallen dollar makes it harder for you to survive.
They take the billions and trillions and give it to their own kind.
Hope you don't mind being wild blind.
We got runaway credit.
Ain't nothing going down unless the crooks in Washington let it.
Now they regret it, but they still don't get it.
Cause the economy is crashing so bad.
These are paramedics.
I want my bail, I want it.
Sweet green cash just dripping with honey.
Gotta keep this economy running.
I need another hit on my bailout money.
Look at the stash.
It's like a mad dash for the cash.
They got the taxpayer taking it in the ass.
The CEOs, they are having this last.
While they're working poor trying to make the big checks last.
They're like money is created with new debts.
While they're rolling in their nipples, it's not a jest.
All the workers on the streets, stripping sweats.
White-collar hustlers are taking everything they can get.
They put the nation on a hyperinflation track.
No presidential administration can take it back.
And now the taxpayer's picking up the slack.
Like they put a high dollar big brother monkey on your back.
I want my bailout money.
Sweet green cash just dripping with honey.
Gotta keep this economy running.
I need another hit on my bailout money.
The prisons are filled with brothers caught on a $50 jack.
But when Whitey take the trillions, the cops can turn their back.
The incompetent bankers, they get their jobs back.
Cause the bankers, smoking money like it was crack.
Take your car, your home, everything that you own.
And when you're jobless and broke, you still gotta pay the loans.
You're thinking of stealing some food, please don't.
Let's go to Washington and you can steal everything you want.
How you gonna solve this?
Dissolve the big scam.
We resolve.
We won't let them steal from our fellow man.
Raise your hands and ask, what is this?
Then we put the Federal Reserve out of business.
Take a look at a dollar bill.
You see the eye above the pyramid looking back at you.
That eye is laughing at you, suckers.
I want my bail.
I want it.
Keeps the car running Sweet green cash just ripping with honey We gotta keep this economy running I need another hit of my bailout money Aren't you tired of paying for that?
Tired of breaking your back for that?
Being oppressed and suppressed?
Why you keep paying your tax for that?
We gotta get out of this financial trap!
And it's never gonna stop until you take your country back!
The politicians that used us, don't you know that they used us?
And the bankers refused us, why the media screwed us?
The authorities do this, what's happening to us?
Cause they make more money every time that they screw us!
But you didn't think they were renting all that funny money just for you!
We are drowning in debt, but the Fed isn't done yet!
What are we gonna get?
Budget's in the red.
Economy's nearly dead.
The politicians said that we're...
Panging by a thread.
The people are being bled.
But get it through your head that we're...
The bankers gotta stay ahead.
Gotta make more bread.
That's when they said bread.
More money! More money! More money! More money! More money! More money! More money! More money! More money!
More money! More money! More money!
It might be shocking to witness, but that's the only way you'll ever get this.
God's in control And though I may not know What you believe but I know is with us The boom and all the children in the classroom They're letting on the boys in the girls' bathroom.
They tell you it's public education, but they just brainwash the kids into genital mutilations.
And those other survivors, they didn't kill in a wolf.
They want to snuff out that baby boom.
Ethnic, too.
You're digging a tomb for who?
It's you.
They lock you down like obedient slaves and fill you with fear a thousand ways.
While they turn your friends into mind slaves with mental haze.
It's amazing people don't see right through it.
The truth is right there if you choose it.
The pain is insane.
They're making us witness.
but I believe that God is with us.
The rigged elections, Deceived the gullible masses with misdirection.
Psychological injection of lies and falsehoods and mental virus infections.
They tried to take him out from a distance.
Headshot bullseye, but they missed him.
Rose up in resistance.
It's the resurrection of a nation that we witness.
Heal the culture of mental sickness.
Reveal the lies of those who did this.
Feel the power of our loving God who stands with us.
Jabbers with medical venom.
We don't even know what's in them.
You can't even breathe.
You die suddenly.
The coroner come and get her.
They say you've got to trust the science.
And while they silence the people who stood in defiance, it's medical terror.
No admission of error.
You get punished for noncompliance.
They pushed hospital homicide.
Fauci lied and millions died.
Weaponized hospital protocols.
Try to kill us all.
Premeditated medical genocide.
We the people demand you cease.
Get your filthy dick from the hands off me.
Your COVID simulation plans all freeze.
Your global war against man is ceased.
No more sickos laying on sleeves.
No more profit from man-made disease.
Your sleight of hand, war on peace.
Your evil fact checker thought police.
When children hold up their hands, stop and please.