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Feb. 25, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:52:37

DTV - Ashton Addison joins Mike and Todd to talk about Future of Cryptocurrency and Privacy

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	- Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV here on brighteon.com, the free speech video platform.
	I'm David DeCentralized.
	I'm David DeCentralized. David DeCentralized. David DeCentralized. David DeCentralized.
	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 as you can see, we've got a great lineup here today.
	Of course, we have Todd joining us remotely from Florida.
	Welcome, Todd.
	And we'll talk more in just a second.
	And our guest in studio here in Texas is Ashton Addison from CryptoCoinShow, a very popular channel on YouTube.
	Welcome.
	It's great to have you here.
	Thank you so much, Mike.
	And thank you, Todd.
	You're welcome.
	This is great.
	Thank you both for being here.
	So Todd, I have to thank you for making this introduction.
	And CryptoCoinShow, you've done 1,500 interviews, I think you said.
	Yep, over the past 10 years or so, before many people knew about crypto.
	Wow.
	And so together, think about the knowledge base here, folks.
	How many interviews we've done and how many crypto projects we've looked at.
	And some of them thrown in the garbage and others like this is awesome.
	So what we're about to have here today, folks, is a really amazing conversation, a big overview about where crypto is right now, privacy and non-privacy, and sort of where it's going as well.
	So Todd, let's jump in with you first.
	What would you like to launch with since we have our guest captured here?
	He's going to answer anything that we throw his way.
	So where do you want to begin?
	I just want to see that meat necklace around his neck and Brody.
	That'll be kind of fun.
	Brody's sleeping over there.
	He's just hanging.
	All right.
	No, Ashton, thank you for being here.
	And before we take a deep dive into crypto, do you mind if I go personal a little bit with you, Ashton?
	Of course.
	All right.
	So over the past few years, you and your wife have been literal decentralized nomads.
	And you set out to determine where you would like to lay roots long term with no preconceived notions, as I understand it, on where that would be.
	And I'd love for you to share a bit about your journey and ultimately where you decided to finally settle down and why.
	Once you get deep into digital work, and once you're in blockchain, really everything is...
	Of course, there can be offices, but if you're going to an office, you're probably one of the select few in blockchain.
	I know teams are working all over the world.
	Once that happens and you're free of the country that you were born in and the 100 square kilometers of where your high school was, all of a sudden the world's your oyster.
	It's pretty hard to make a decision on where should I go when I have the whole world to choose from.
	I spent a few years That actually happened in Mexico near the Tulum Crypto Club.
	I actually met her at the Crypto Club when I was speaking.
	So that was a blessing.
	In Tulum, there are a lot of ancient ruins there as well.
	There's a lot of Mayan ruins there.
	Whether the energy is still there in full or it's been depreciated a little bit from the tourism is another story.
	But there's definitely a lot of like-minded individuals.
	Freedom.
	I managed to find the Tulum Crypto Club and spoke there for many months, just preaching the word of blockchain and managed to meet my wife there.
	We looked for other hotspots around the world where we might find similar people that are nomads, love blockchain, love freedom, like privacy.
	And look through Thailand, Spain, El Salvador, for sure.
	I was actually at the Bitcoin City announcement in 2021. Wow.
	So check that out.
	Central America, Bitcoin City in El Salvador, Bitcoin Jungle in Costa Rica, Bitcoin Lake.
	In Guatemala.
	Wow.
	There's a lot of Bitcoins.
	You really checked it out.
	Yeah, I've checked it all out and seen the attempt at adopting Bitcoin as a currency in these small towns.
	I bought some Malabids in Guatemala with Bitcoin.
	I bought some stuff at Bitcoin Beach where Bitcoin at the time needed to be accepted because it is a government currency.
	They've just changed that actually.
	I saw that because of pressure from the World Bank, was it?
	I think that they needed some more IMF loans probably to buy more Bitcoin really.
	But I'm pretty sure everyone still takes it.
	So I spent some Bitcoin on Lightning in Bitcoin Beach, just from some picnic tables of women that had nothing except some little necklaces and their phone.
	So I checked all that out.
	Then decided, okay, where are we going to settle and actually start?
	Because nomading is amazing and you can check out the world.
	But also, eventually, you might want to start a family.
	You might want to take a break.
	Maybe you have one or two locations where you move every six months.
	Or if you have a family, you need to find somewhere.
	It's also good to have a refrigerator.
	Definitely.
	Is it going to be in Bitcoin Beach where there's...
	Sure, there's Bitcoin payments, but there's no infrastructure, very little healthcare, all of these things.
	So I ended up settling back in America after the journey around.
	And we know all the best spots to maybe take a vacation, maybe an elongated vacation, but to live your life there, maybe for a year or two.
	We spent three or four years on this journey, and that's enough time to get the travel bug out, I think, as well.
	They ended up in Austin?
	Yeah.
	There's a huge Bitcoin community in Austin.
	University of Austin was one of the first universities that just announced this week they bought $5 million in Bitcoin.
	So the governor of Texas just announced a strategic reserve for the state of Texas?
	Yeah, they did.
	We also spoke with the Texas Blockchain Council last month or two and went to the conference in Dallas.
	And the legislation, I think, is coming from them working with the regulators and the policymakers is the strongest of any state to put forth Bitcoin and blockchain-related proposals.
	Interesting.
	And the Texas stock market is coming.
	Maybe that'll be tokenized as well.
	That's amazing.
	And we have our own gold repository here in the city.
	Yeah, so there's a lot going on here.
	So how long have you been in Austin?
	Just for six months.
	Oh, wow.
	Well, welcome.
	Thank you.
	Ashton, I know that there's been a little recent issue lately where as you are coming back to the U.S., you are being forced.
	Can you just share a little bit about this vaccine nonsense?
	Yeah, sure.
	Well, as a part of the immigration There's the medical, as you would call it, the medical industrial complex.
	They want you to make sure you have XYZ of all these shots, or else you're not going to be let in.
	And I'm actually Canadian originally, so I'm not American.
	My wife is, and now that we're settling here, now I'm coming in from Canada.
	The immigration requirement for COVID vaccines was just dropped.
	It was, yeah.
	There's six or seven other ones that are not dropped.
	Okay, got it.
	But at least it's not an mRNA injection.
	No, no.
	Well, that's something.
	That was dropped on January 22nd.
	And we'll see what RFK has to say about it.
	Yeah, that's going to be interesting.
	Have you gotten those already, or are you still kind of...
	No.
	Spreading water, waiting for RFK to maybe do his thing and just say, screw that.
	Yeah, I haven't gotten it, and I don't want to.
	But we'll see the hand that feeds you what will happen.
	So we're figuring it all out.
	All right, very cool.
	So, okay, you're Canadian.
	And so I have to ask you, does this Texas flag frighten you?
	No.
	I think it's great.
	Show the flag.
	Show camera six, guys.
	People need to see this.
	There we go.
	The Texas flag.
	Some Canadians get really tremors because also I'm armed.
	It's a controversial thing right now with Trump saying 51st state.
	Isn't that wild?
	I think that's crazy.
	Trump, what do you mean?
	I think...
	As a nomad that isn't necessarily tied to Canada anymore, I would rather be earning in American dollars.
	As you can see, the Canadian dollar is just going down the hole.
	The GDP chart comparing Canada to America post-COVID is like, Canada looks like a little bunny hill.
	It's going down.
	They need to do some things to solve that.
	It's tough.
	What do you do now that your main trade partner is forcing you to become part of America?
	It's wild.
	But look, we love Canadians.
	We welcome you here to Texas.
	And you just have to take at least one AR-15 course while you're in Texas.
	Make sure you get totally up to speed.
	You can't really be a full Texan unless you...
	You know how to do quick reloads.
	As long as we have that established, we're all good.
	Continuing with, and of course I know all the people who can do that training.
	If you want to do that, you'll have a blast.
	Getting to crypto, which is really the focus here, all jokes aside.
	Let me ask you for your big picture question, but let me start with a little bit of a pushback.
	Todd and I have talked about this quite a lot on the show.
	Bitcoin has in many ways, and of course we've had Aaron Day as a guest, and Aaron is a big critic of what happened with the block size wars, etc.
	And I see what Aaron is saying.
	I agree with him.
	Bitcoin has not fulfilled its original promise of being fast, cheap, transactional, everyday use currency.
	That dream seems to be dead, right?
	So where are we with Bitcoin?
	That's a great question.
	The way that Satoshi envisioned it in the eight pages that he could explain, that you can read on the white paper still.
	It's hard to know if that's how it was supposed to be on day one, year one, or year 100. And there's all of these arguments about how we should shape it and fulfill the prophecy of how Bitcoin should be.
	And of course there was the...
	Should we make it bigger?
	Does that make it more centralized?
	If we don't agree, we'll fork off to Bitcoin Cash.
	There's a whole other discussion, not Bitcoin.
	Or there's Lightning Network Layer 2 solutions, which are not as decentralized as Bitcoin.
	I've used them, but no one really uses that.
	I've tested it out.
	I still use Bitcoin transfers.
	You couldn't buy a coffee for $5.
	But you could buy something for a few hundred dollars, and you'd be like, okay, this is still a better deal than maybe some other alternatives.
	To be used for everyday purchases, there's still that issue.
	To be sending $100 million, then now you're talking immense savings, or a million or a thousand.
	But it seems to me that most of the people advocating for Bitcoin now are really calling it digital gold.
	A store of value.
	And it really begs the question then, okay, so it's not really a transactional crypto, but we still need a transactional crypto.
	In your view, you've interviewed 1,500 people.
	What are the best contenders or what's the best technology?
	Even without naming projects, is there an approach that can fulfill that?
	Yeah.
	Well, I think right now the closest thing that we have are the other top blockchains like Ethereum and Solana.
	And Ethereum also has arguments about, currently, because the market's going sideways, I think it's about actually as low as $0.04 to make a transaction, which is very low.
	But when everyone's transacting, and if the world decides to actually adopt Ethereum on the layer one, you could be looking at $20.
	If you're actually doing a swap that requires more smart contract interaction, it could be $50, $100, which is, of course, even worse than Bitcoin, not attainable at all.
	But there is the Ethereum Layer 2 solutions, which there's so many of them now, including Base, for example, Coinbase, and I'm sure they're trying to get that into the regulators.
	And you're looking at a cent or less on some of the Layer 2s that settle on Ethereum, but they're not actually on Ethereum.
	So there are many, many options of multi-billion dollar projects that can do transactions.
	And you're probably looking at using a stablecoin USDC or USDT. Say I want to pay for a coffee.
	You could use a layer two with a stablecoin and you'd be paying a cent or less in transaction fees.
	I think that's the most practical method right now.
	Makes sense.
	Todd, what do you think about all that?
	I want to keep coming back to Bitcoin, because when you were first talking, everywhere you went had Bitcoin in the name somehow, somewhere.
	Bitcoin, Bitcoin skyscraper, Bitcoin Dubai.
	I don't think you told us about Dubai.
	But is Bitcoin now what I'd call a Druid Babylonian bastard cryptocurrency, one that is now manipulated by the powers that be through surveillance, censorship, fractional reserve, and rehypothecation, Ashton?
	Yeah, I think, you know, despite what I said about these transactions are great on Ethereum, as in it could be lower cost if you do the right things, there's no comparison to the adoption of Bitcoin and Bitcoin payments, and people preferring to pay with Bitcoin even if the cost is a little bit higher.
	And what we've seen throughout 2024, and now...
	Moving into 2025 was, in the beginning of 2024, we saw the launch of the Bitcoin ETF on the stock market and billions flowing in.
	It's already the most successful ETF launch in terms of volume and buying power of all time, surpassed that of gold, of 20 years of buying gold in the ETF. There's already more Bitcoin in one year.
	And now we're heading into year two.
	This is continuing.
	Does it taint?
	Bitcoin itself, for example, if you have Bitcoin on a cold storage wallet on your phone, the ETF, if you buy the ETF, you're not actually owning Bitcoin itself.
	You're owning a fictional stock where the stock company's holding your Bitcoin for you somewhere.
	Hopefully they have it on a one-to-one reserve, but you can't just redeem that or they could decide to take it away.
	Whereas if you had a cold storage Bitcoin, you...
	It can't be taken away.
	So does that taint Bitcoin?
	I don't think so.
	I think that it really was inevitable that for the people that adopted Bitcoin early on in the cypherpunks, they should have expected that if this is going to become something that's mainstream in the global currency of the world, the institutions are going to get involved.
	And they're going to try to do things to it, whether it's the block size and more centralization or ETFs and holding your Bitcoin for you.
	They're going to do other things to try to accumulate that Bitcoin and hold it for you or try to take away some of the power because Bitcoin is one of the most powerful tools in the world.
	It is indeed very powerful.
	And the thing I love the most about Bitcoin is the fact that it cannot be counterfeited by any government.
	This is the problem with dollar or fiat currency printing, is that it can always be counterfeited by nations.
	Be careful.
	What?
	Which part?
	I'm going to push back just a little bit.
	No, no, I'm not done.
	I'm not done.
	Oh, okay.
	Okay.
	No, but we'll give you the floor next, but I was going to bring in something else.
	All right, sorry.
	To my producers, show my screen.
	Here's a book that everybody needs to read.
	It's called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, right?
	And this is from, I forgot what year this was originally published.
	2016?
	No.
	Here it is, 1841. Oh my gosh.
	Yeah.
	I mean, this goes way back.
	Because nothing has changed in human behavior.
	And when I see all this money flooding into Bitcoin ETFs, I think of this book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
	Because I would never advocate anybody buy a Bitcoin ETF, because the whole point is to have custody, have control.
	And I know, Todd, you're going to talk about rehypothecation, right?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Okay, go for it.
	Go for it.
	Yeah.
	And you're right.
	You're right about that.
	Yeah.
	So everybody, rehypothecation or fractional reserve is where you have a bank, right, who...
	You're going to borrow $100,000 from them, but they don't have the $100,000 to be able to loan you.
	And it's fiction, right?
	So these ETFs, we don't know now whether this 21 million Bitcoin supply is 21 million.
	It's not.
	I agree.
	It's not.
	It's probably $60 million, maybe higher, because all of these, the greed kicks in to where, you know, you may have an ETF go out and buy, you know, a thousand Bitcoin, but they're going to loan it out because now it's just fictitious paper.
	They're going to loan it out to 10,000 people.
	So all of those 10,000 people are like, woo, I'm rich, win, moon.
	So, Todd.
	Yes, go ahead.
	No, this is so cool.
	And it's based on the premise that not everybody's going to ask for their Bitcoin at the same time.
	Now, guys, this is exactly what's happening in the gold market right now today.
	And Todd, we both interviewed Andy Sheckman.
	Andy Sheckman is the guy who understands this the best.
	We're going to get him back on.
	This is happening in gold.
	So gold has been rehypothecated where, well, oh, we have so many bars in COMEX. We have so many bars in London in the...
	The central banks in Britain, and we claim to have this much gold.
	Now everybody's asking for the gold, and they're like, well, we don't really have it.
	Todd, that's what you're talking about, and I see this happening with Bitcoin also, which means when that scheme collapses, whether it's gold, what happens when COMEX possibly defaults on gold deliveries?
	What happens?
	$35,000.
	Gold?
	Yeah, maybe so.
	But what happens if, let's say, what if Coinbase were to default on Bitcoin redemptions?
	What would happen to the price of Bitcoin?
	It would plummet.
	Because faith would be crushed like FTX. So what are your thoughts, Ash?
	There's a lot here.
	There is.
	I think no one can fully understand Bitcoin if they only own an ETF. You have to own Bitcoin.
	You will never fully understand it unless you have at least a dollar in your own possession in cold storage that cannot be touched by anybody.
	Agreed.
	I think that's just the final answer.
	But more and more of the Bitcoin participants...
	Look, number one, do you have any idea how many people actually have self-custody in their own wallets versus just the exchanges, not to even mention the ETFs?
	Because I think, Todd, most owners of Bitcoin...
	Have owned it on the exchanges, right?
	Is nuts.
	It's nuts.
	And that's bonkers.
	Leave them on the exchanges.
	And I mean, you know...
	Me, I have covered private crypto for three and a half years.
	And I will tell you, we recently have been going through a scenario where we have an exchange that is giving fair warning to get your crypto off of their exchange.
	And do you know we have been at it for four months, screaming from the rooftops for people to get there?
	We went from there being 3.9 million coins on this exchange to over four months.
	1.1 million.
	So we made great progress, but can you imagine?
	There was 4 million coins on that exchange.
	It's as easy as just taking it off, putting it in your own cold storage wallet.
	It's mind-boggling.
	People lost their passwords or something, you know?
	They always say, if you're definitely not trading it, moving it in the next 30 days, then remove it.
	But ideally, 7 days.
	Move it on.
	Trade to the asset you want and withdraw.
	And that's why the industry tries to bring awareness to that on January 3rd, which is the day that the first Bitcoin was minted.
	And it's called Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins Day.
	So every year on January 3rd, they encourage everyone...
	The coins that are on the exchange are not yours.
	Withdraw them to prove that the reserves are 100% of the exchange and hopefully don't put them back on if you're not trading.
	Withdraw them from the exchange.
	It should probably be more than once a year that they give that reminder.
	But there is at least that to try and remind people.
	Here's what's really interesting.
	The topic of counterparty risk.
	If I hold Bitcoin in my own wallet, I really don't have counterparty risk because nobody else has to meet an obligation for me to have those coins.
	But the minute we go into the ETF layer, now we have counterparty risk introduced into Bitcoin.
	I have to trust the financial company, whoever it is, to make good on their promises.
	Now gold has no counterparty risk either.
	Stocks do.
	Treasuries obviously do.
	That's a big counterparty risk, if you ask me.
	Even Tether has counterparty risk, because how do we know if Tether has the assets they claim to have?
	That's a big question also.
	But it seems like the ETFs have just made Bitcoin a lot more risky.
	While people think it's just a way to get rich, but they're not understanding the risk.
	It depends which risks you're talking about, I guess.
	If you're holding Bitcoin cold storage in your wallet, is it riskier now than it was two years ago before the ETFs?
	No.
	But if you are buying ETFs, which is not buying Bitcoin, you're not owning Bitcoin.
	It's more like owning stocks that have exposure to Bitcoin.
	You understand what you're owning.
	Do people understand?
	Because I think people buy Bitcoin ETFs and they think they bought Bitcoin.
	I hope not.
	Probably some people do believe that they own Bitcoin, but try to check it up on the blockchain.
	That's the ultimate answer.
	Think about this too.
	Take a regular stock trading company.
	You log into Robinhood and you buy stocks.
	You log in and you think, I own Apple.
	You don't.
	Robinhood owns Apple.
	And Robinhood has an IOU to you.
	You don't actually own that stock because your name's not on the stock shares.
	And if Robinhood, God forbid, were to go under, you're screwed.
	So it's the same situation with Bitcoin ETFs.
	I think so.
	But it was inevitably going to happen.
	You can't say that it's 100% good for the industry, but it has pushed the awareness of Bitcoin.
	Hopefully, some of those people who bought the ETF or they heard that there's now exposure from major institutions on derivatives of Bitcoin, they understand, hey, maybe I should get actual Bitcoin.
	And if it pushes them to that, then we can say, job well done.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Maybe ETFs can be a stepping stone for people to ultimately become holders of their own wallet.
	I think a lot of people that want to diversify their investments outside of crypto, they think, okay, well, I should probably have some in the stock market.
	Let's stick to the Bitcoin narrative, and they're buying MicroStrategy, or they're buying Bitcoin mining stocks.
	I know many people that love Bitcoin, they have Bitcoin, but they don't have the Bitcoin ETFs necessarily, but MicroStrategy is a bit of a different...
	Just strategy now, since they've rebranded, is an exposure to Bitcoin and other Bitcoin mining companies that are public companies.
	So it's not owning Bitcoin, but they're still exposed to the volatility of Bitcoin.
	Yeah, well said.
	Hey, Ashton, Bitcoin was over $100,000, there's all this FOMO, and then boom, it wasn't over $100,000, it went down.
	Talk to us about margin traders.
	On how much wealth was destroyed in that one fell swoop.
	And I submit to you that what concerns me about all of that and the Druid Babylonian bastards now being in charge is this is so easily manipulated now by them, I believe.
	I mean, they can just wipe out so much wealth and take it all back.
	Can they not?
	Yeah, there's some incredible numbers from the most recent liquidations in January.
	And I think, you know, the market manipulators or makers, they play the narrative so well.
	They think, you know, Trump's coming in.
	It's going to skyrocket on the day he's coming.
	You know, Trump coin, this is a sign that all of crypto is going up.
	And ironically enough, the Trump coin launch, I saw it right when it launched.
	It was on the night of the crypto ball.
	Which was the Friday before the inauguration a couple days later.
	That really sucked the liquidity of all of the other coins of whoever DGENs were still trading moved into Trumpcoin and then all of that sort of cascaded off and sold out.
	And you know Bitcoin didn't drop that much but I think all of the people who are inclined to margin trade They are also the get-rich-quick kind of people.
	And they're looking at altcoins and memecoins because they think that they can out-trade Bitcoin and they can make it big quick.
	So they're risking a lot.
	And the liquidations, it cascades down.
	When Bitcoin drops 5% because of the liquidity and the pairs for altcoins, Ethereum, and lower market cap coins.
	5% on Bitcoin means 15% on Ethereum.
	That means 30% on meme coins and small market cap things.
	And all of a sudden, anybody who's leveraging 5x, you've lost 150%, you're liquidated.
	So the liquidations on the official numbers on the website were saying around 2 billion of funds.
	It was almost a million people.
	Over 800,000 to a million different traders.
	Lost $2 billion to the exchanges.
	And of course, if you're trading on a centralized exchange, they can see how much your position is and where your stop loss is.
	And if they want to push Bitcoin an extra $1,000 down because they know your stop loss is there and liquidate you, you're playing against the casino.
	So you have to know that when you're going into these high-risk things.
	But there was actually a more detailed post from the CEO of Bybit Exchange, which is one of the major margin derivative exchanges, that he was saying the APIs actually couldn't process how much was being liquidated.
	So it wasn't an accurate number.
	It was actually, he was estimating $8 to $10 billion was liquidated.
	In January from that.
	Even over $2 billion, it was larger than the FTX crash.
	The sentiment has been really negative in the last month.
	More has been liquidated than when the FTX crash happened.
	Really, it's sort of a non-event.
	Nothing really happened besides Trump getting in and these pro-Bitcoin stances moving forward.
	It sounds like positivity in the market.
	Besides the Trump coin launching, and then I guess the nail in the coffin was the Melania coin, which people were like, okay, you're already siphoning money out of the market.
	Three days later, you need to launch Melania coin as well.
	Now it just sounds like a big grift.
	And from there, the sentiment's been quite negative.
	But that's the markets of crypto.
	It goes in multi-month little packets.
	There's a lot of hype.
	This past one was in November leading into December, and then it crashes down.
	And if you look, At the past four-year cycles of Bitcoin, there's always 30% retracements three or four times each time.
	And Bitcoin continues to come back.
	But of course, those market makers are playing those games with you to get the Bitcoin at a cheaper price from you.
	So when it keeps moving up inevitably to hundreds of thousands of dollars, they have all the money and you've lost.
	Ashton, you referenced earlier degens.
	Is that degenerates?
	Yeah, that's the crypto term for people that are in the weeds of the coins that have just come out this day and they're trying to find the next 100x return.
	So they are the crypto degenerates, but they just go by degens.
	So here on this show, Decentralized TV, our philosophy, and I know Todd, you'll agree with me on this, we have zero interest in meme coins and that kind of just nonsense.
	and Fartcoin has a billion dollar valuation for whatever reason.
	Buy it as a joke, I guess.
	But we have every interest in the utility of coins.
	We actually want to see a world where cryptocurrency is part of not just digital gold, but day-to-day transactions and the way people interact with each other financially or give gifts to each other.
	If I'm at a restaurant, I should not only be able to pay for the meal with crypto, I should be able to tip.
	The waiter with crypto as well, instead of just handing out, like, I hand out goldbacks right now.
	Cool.
	Yeah, I just give them goldbacks because I don't have to explain, like, oh, you need a wallet, you got to set it up, you got to send me, like, here, just have some gold, you know?
	And everybody's like, yay!
	So, how does crypto cross that chasm?
	You've done a lot of interviews.
	Do you see a pathway for it to become an order of magnitude easier somehow for people?
	Right now, the way that it works is if you want to accept crypto as a tip, you're going to need a wallet of some sort.
	For the most part, they're making that easy.
	I'm not saying this is an optimal solution, but nowadays, a Samsung phone has a wallet built in.
	That you could accept it on your PayPal account.
	Robinhood has Bitcoin.
	You could be like, open any of these.
	There's got to be an app where you have a wallet already and you don't know it.
	If you're being forced to accept Bitcoin as a tip, you probably have a wallet on your phone and you don't realize it yet.
	How we can make that happen where I can send somebody Bitcoin and they don't have a wallet.
	One of my acquaintance friends that is working on a great project in Canada, he's worked through Costa Rica to actually tap into the cell phone network and sort of partner with the providers where I could text you some Bitcoin to your number and then you can receive a text and when you click on it, it's sort of like opening a wallet at the same time without really realizing it and you can get that Bitcoin on your phone.
	And they've had those stories in Africa for like 10 years as well, the M-Pesa, where you can send Bitcoin through the cell network, sort of avoid the wallets.
	I don't know if that will catch on, but that's one alternative if you don't have a wallet.
	Yeah, because everybody's got a phone number.
	Yeah, you could text them their phone number, text them some crypto, and they could have it.
	That would make a lot of sense.
	Ashim, why are there so few viable use cases for crypto other than speculation?
	I think it's just the technical barriers to entry.
	It's sort of like the internet.
	When it came out in the 90s, what were the first use cases before we realized that something like Amazon could come along and actually make our lives a lot easier?
	It took a few years to realize that you wouldn't be scammed by putting your credit card on the internet.
	And of course there was some along the way, which there have been in crypto as well.
	But eventually the kinks were worked out and now all of a sudden you can buy something and it'll be at your house in two hours and you're not worried about your credit card information or who's the person.
	All that's worked out.
	And that's what needs to happen and is happening with crypto as well.
	Crypto's Bitcoin itself is at its 15-year mark, but the adoption of the infrastructure of the other blockchains and stuff, and really people didn't want to work on anything when they didn't have financial incentive to do so.
	Once Bitcoin really kicked off, people said, hey, we can make companies out of this and actually provide services where we can also generate revenue as well.
	And there are a lot of services now, but it's still going to take more time.
	I think the catalyst of the ETF, just the awareness of Bitcoin as not being a scam has really helped.
	But now we need more companies to find ways to provide services.
	Well, maybe now under the Trump administration, with the SEC becoming more crypto-friendly, and the banking system no longer being direct enemies of crypto, then we can finally be able to deploy crypto solutions in common e-commerce platforms.
	Really, the Biden administration was threatening banks to not do that.
	Let me just plug your show on YouTube.
	It's called CryptoCoin Show with Ashton Addison.
	That's our guest here today, everybody.
	Here it is on YouTube.
	And also, you've got a Substack, which is CryptoCoinShow.Substack.com, right?
	Yep.
	Okay, there it is.
	So, it's great for people to follow you.
	How often or how many...
	Videos or interviews do you do a week, let's say?
	I set out in the beginning realizing that if I wasn't going to do a lot, then it was going to take forever to get to 1,500 or 1,000 videos.
	So there's multiple per week, two, three, four videos per week, depending on the market conditions and how often really good projects come along that could be the next unicorn or llama, as they say in AI and crypto.
	Because I'm also looking for, you know, it's nice when you find the next Ethereum or the next Bitcoin.
	There will be nothing exactly like Bitcoin, but the next blockchain technology that happens to provide that service that actually brings crypto to a billion people.
	If you do get involved or invest in that in the beginning, then you can help make history.
	It could be very rewarding if the infrastructure has high utility, I think.
	Let me ask you, this is one of my big concerns about Bitcoin.
	I know Todd shares this concern with me.
	Of course, it's been compared to digital tulip bulb mania.
	And the entire value of Bitcoin appears to be based on some combination of faith and an understanding of some of its intrinsic properties, like divisibility and semi-fungibility, not full fungibility, but also...
	In fact, it's very portable.
	You can instantly, or near instantly, within minutes, transfer it to other people.
	That's very handy.
	That has some intrinsic value, and the non-counterfeit ability, except for rehypothecation, Todd.
	But that has intrinsic value.
	However, most of the value seems to be just people believing that it's going to be more valuable in the future.
	So it's a perception of future value that gives it today's value.
	That is a characteristic that is strongly indicative of tulip bulb mania.
	And those types of projects typically end very badly.
	In your view, based on your experience, is there any reason why Bitcoin won't suffer a massive loss of faith at some point?
	What's your take?
	Obviously, there's a difference in utility and value from the tulips, and also the fact that it will be around for, at least with Satoshi's vision, distributing new Bitcoins into the system until 2140, which is over 100 years from now, and the fact that you can transfer money around the world for pennies on the dollar compared to traditional finance.
	It's not perfect.
	We'll see if they work out the kinks.
	But I'm not worried about that.
	I've talked to people over the years that think Bitcoin is worthless or it's going to zero.
	Of course, the mainstream media liked to say that for years and years.
	Whenever they say, think the opposite.
	Those things combined.
	The price of Bitcoin just goes up from future speculation or it actually goes up because more people start to use it or hold it.
	They don't have to go down the same path.
	It's sort of two different things.
	So I think it'll be a combination of both.
	I think that more people will hopefully start to actually use Bitcoin.
	But whether people will use it as Satoshi imagined in the paper as a peer-to-peer cash that's being transacted every day.
	Most people I know, yeah, they don't want to spend their Bitcoin.
	They want to hold it, and they think it has digital gold.
	Maybe at one point, people did transact with gold every day, but for a short period of time compared to the length of humanity.
	Right now, nobody's trading their gold.
	They're storing it as value, and Bitcoin is similar to that.
	Of course, there's jewelry and all this other stuff, but with the principles of money fitting those three main categories that economics professors Categorize store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange.
	Then it fits those three, and it's a new asset class altogether because of the internet.
	We can now transfer it to Australia and back in seconds.
	I think that 15 years is a very, very small amount of time so far to have tested out this and worked out the kinks.
	Have people understand that it's not a scam.
	It's part of the future of the internet and of currency.
	As time goes on, of course, the blockchain keeps getting larger and larger.
	And more stronger.
	But also, new users, if they're going to have self-custody, they have to download the entire blockchain.
	That becomes more and more cumbersome, especially for mobile devices.
	What's the size of the Bitcoin blockchain?
	I'm not sure on the exact size.
	It's either a few hundred gigabytes, maybe 400 gigabytes or something, which will only get larger.
	There is discussion around true decentralization in the currency and the fact that right now the people that are controlling the network, you need an Amazon-sized warehouse of ASICs and graphics cards to...
	You're just contributing to somebody else delegating and validating the blocks for you.
	There are people that are mining themselves.
	Last month, a single miner actually won the block reward.
	Every 10 minutes, one person successfully validates.
	More than a quarter million dollars themselves, they were mining with one rig by themselves.
	So it is possible.
	It's very unusual, though.
	It is unusual.
	But as more adoption happens, there's that balance.
	That's winning the lottery version of mining.
	Well, it's the amount of decentralization, whether it's per person or if it's warehouses, but...
	Owned by different people and in different countries.
	Depending on how you define decentralization, you can say it's decentralized, but it's not going to be on everybody's edge device, and you're not going to be able to validate yourself from something small.
	Because of the restrictions and the way that if you need to record the history of all Bitcoin transactions since the beginning of time, unless we find a way to compress that to fit on your phone, you need a warehouse.
	Yeah.
	Well, Todd, you know, blockchain pruning.
	Yeah.
	It's got its advantages.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Hey, I have a question.
	One last question for me, Ashton.
	As you know from your interview with me on your show, I'm all about the search for superior money where we can all exchange value privately.
	What are your thoughts on privacy tech and the future of privacy coins, such as Monero, Epic Cash, Zeno, Firo, and others?
	It's a great question.
	In terms of privacy coins, I've dabbled a little bit.
	I have experimented with Monero and Epic Cash, transacting with them, and they do work well.
	They have a decentralized network.
	Is it going to be adopted by people who aren't as techy as me and are deep in the weeds of crypto?
	It's hard because there's already a barrier to entry for Bitcoin and for Ethereum.
	For Monero, it's more.
	I think people that are searching out privacy and they're hardcore with it, it's a good solution.
	But how that will reach more of an early adopters mainstream?
	Well, I have an idea about that.
	I think the first time that government abuses the Bitcoin blockchain and goes after a lot of people who thought their transactions were private, I can see a mad rush into Monero at that point.
	And actually, from my point of view, Monero is...
	It's no more difficult to use than Bitcoin.
	It is slower to sync the blockchain and things like that.
	But you don't have to understand how it works in order to use it.
	The privacy layers can all be really hidden from the typical user where you don't have to think about it.
	It's just private by default.
	I think the hard part is The on-ramping and off-ramping.
	Bitcoin, the knowledge that you need to understand how to transact with Bitcoin and Monero, it's the same.
	It's really not that hard.
	You just go in the wallet, you just choose the amount and press send.
	But how do you get from US dollars in your bank into Monero conveniently?
	And if the person needs to pay their rent, can they pay it in Monero?
	How are they going to transact back?
	Maybe they can move it into Bitcoin and maybe the person will pay with Bitcoin.
	But those ramps and the decentralized trading and DEXs, multi-chain especially, because Bitcoin and Monero are different blockchains, they don't have the same communication layer.
	That's something that's growing right now in more of the weeds of the blockchain ecosystem is chaining different blockchains together and growing the liquidity of them and the communication so that the applications aren't siloed and the liquidity can be there and we can move from one blockchain to another in a decentralized way.
	Because right now, 99% of people, they have to put their Bitcoin on the exchange, which is giving your keys to the exchange and then tell them, trade for Monero and then withdraw it to your wallet.
	But there's a lot of work in atomic swaps and swap DEXs and so on.
	It seems like this year we're going to see some pretty big things announced in that realm, doesn't it?
	Yeah, it's continuing to grow, and of course the psychological barriers to entry are slightly higher, but really it's not that much different of an experience.
	I'm looking forward to seeing more atomic swaps and DEXs, and I've been on the lookout for different ways to transact, because you don't want to have to, if you're in Ethereum and you want to go to Solana and then you want to go to Monero, you don't want to go through The more steps, the harder it is.
	We want this to be an Amazon experience.
	Just one click and whatever you want, that's what you get.
	And you don't want to swap to fail, and then you're wondering, oh my gosh, will I get my Bitcoin back or whatever?
	Really, you want non-custodial swaps, atomic swaps.
	But it seems like that's not really mature yet in the industry.
	No, it's not.
	It's there on some of the chains, but Not with Monero at this point.
	It's not mature.
	Well, there you go, Todd.
	Shout out tradeogre.com.
	Yeah, you're right.
	I've used that interface, and they do a great job with it.
	It's really simple.
	It's just clean.
	Just so that this doesn't intimidate everybody, if you want to get Monero, well, first of all, you could open up a Kraken account.
	True.
	And then you can exchange your surveilled asset for any of the privacy coins.
	I think all of the majors are on there.
	And then you can take those and Pull those into your own self-custody.
	And now what's happened is you've gone from a surveillance coin to where you've just disappeared, buddy.
	And now your cryptocurrency is in cold storage, in your custody.
	Nobody knows you have it.
	And I think, let me add CakeWallet to that shout-out, too, because CakeWallet, I think, really does a great job working with privacy.
	Yeah, Cake works well.
	CakeWallet, StackWallet is the other one, and it's StackWallet.
	It was created by Diego Salazar, who created the cakewalk.
	Okay, okay, got it.
	Right.
	So, I still, look, my prediction, I'd love to have your reaction on this, Ashton.
	I think there's going to be a privacy wake-up event of some kind that's going to suddenly make people realize the critical importance of privacy.
	You know, like, right now, people mistakenly think that Bitcoin is private.
	And if you ask most casual Bitcoin users, they still think it's private, which is bizarre.
	But I think there's going to be an event, I don't know if it's some kind of hack or a hack of an exchange or a hack of whatever, suddenly a lot of people's Bitcoin is going to get exposed.
	And you know that can be physically dangerous, right?
	You can get kidnapped in many countries and give us your Bitcoin.
	Totally.
	There have been events that have happened in the recent past.
	For example, tornado cash getting shut down.
	That guy was just pardoned, right?
	He was, yeah, which is great because they're arguing it's just software and people are hosting it on different servers.
	Nobody really controls it.
	In that case, there wasn't a loss of people's personal funds, so to say.
	There was an exposure of some people who used it you were able to identify.
	Yeah, you thought you were obfuscating where this was moving, but actually we found it.
	I don't know what the event is going to be that actually helps more than 25-50% of people wake up and say, hey, I should focus on privacy more.
	I think just in general, people just protecting their funds, like you're saying, I just don't want my Bitcoin to be stolen or to be hacked or to be phished.
	There's all those Scams and phishing attempts going on.
	If privacy coins and protocols are a solution to that, I know real well that even just scrolling through X, half of the things you can click on the one wrong link and your whole wallet will be drained.
	You try to mint an NFT because you thought it was cool and then all of a sudden you give permission to drain your wallet.
	There's hundreds of different techniques.
	They send you a Zoom link or Google Meet or Microsoft, and you've downloaded an EXE that's now keylogged to your computer.
	There's a hundred different ways they can get at you.
	When they see that this technology of privacy and privacy coins can help protect your funds, some of the exchanges when governments came and seized those funds they had like Bitcoin, $100,000, some of the exchanges when governments came and seized those funds they had like They still don't know.
	And it's like they've never found it because that is the ultimate privacy technology.
	I think the mic is going to be centered around censorship and the coins out there that now purport to be censorship resistant that aren't.
	Bitcoin, there are going to be people who get really, really comfy with just being free with their data.
	And at some point in time, they're going to do something or there'll be a group of people doing something or whatever.
	And then the DBBs will come in and they're going to shut it down and they're going to make sure that whoever has these coins can't use them.
	They freeze them.
	And that's where I think people, because they will have their wealth frozen, they'll say, if I could do it again, God, I wish I wasn't in a surveillance coin.
	I wish I was in a privacy coin.
	Well, we saw that kind of moment during COVID, right?
	Government enforced lockdowns and mandates and also...
	The Canadian government locking down the trucker protests, their bank accounts, and people who donated to them, their bank accounts were seized.
	That was a Justin Trudeau special right there.
	That woke up the whole world, actually, to the importance of really decentralizing crypto.
	Everyone's forgot about it by now, except you and me.
	I think a lot of people in Canada haven't forgot about that.
	Even if it didn't affect them, even if they didn't donate, Anybody who has the ability to leave the country and be a digital nomad or has any sort of sense of freedom, they're still thinking about that.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, that changed my behavior.
	Yeah?
	I just encourage you, Ashton, to, because you're so prolific in your creation, is seriously, I'm being serious on this, is give even a little bit more focus to Privacy coins and privacy projects.
	Just be the tip of the spear there, letting people know what exists.
	It's going to be fascinating because I know with Epic Cash, for example, there are now a lot of discussion around where you're going.
	Everybody has an email address where you're going to be able to very effectively be able to email somebody some Epic Cash and have it be just an absolute private, workable transaction where nobody knows.
	I have no idea how it's going to work, but I know it's in process.
	That's the kind of stuff that we just need to keep our ear to the ground.
	There's a lot of innovation.
	In fact, I wanted to ask you, Ashton, from the interviews you've done over the last six months, what has really stood out for you as the most interesting projects that stand to really improve the infrastructure of crypto?
	I think there's always narratives of what's the latest industry that's being disrupted with crypto or what's the latest use case.
	I don't know if anybody can really help more than just the price of Bitcoin.
	That really helps people get aware of it.
	I don't want to say the wallet infrastructure, but having more That's going to help with adoption.
	And also the fact that with inflation and the way the economy is going, people realize, I need to be investing in something that I'm not going to be losing all my money and living paycheck to paycheck.
	That's just going to naturally push people into Bitcoin and crypto.
	The fact that they get to hold their own funds and all these other benefits is a nice touch on top.
	But just seeing the inflation versus Bitcoin, seeing iPhones or houses priced in Bitcoin over the years, the amount of Bitcoin keeps going down because nothing is being able to keep up with the value that Bitcoin is retaining.
	Yeah.
	True.
	But beyond that, in terms of The innovation side, is there anything on your radar that looks like a possible game changer or a way to make it much easier for people to get started?
	Right now, the major thing that is going to be changing the game is AI. AI with blockchain.
	It started out as, okay, we're using LLMs.
	We're using ChatGPT.
	Two great recommendations on I know you already have some other solutions yourself as well, but I just did an interview with one called Libertai, Libertai, which is from Aleph Cloud.
	They're a decentralized cloud provider with private LLMs.
	And then there's another project from Eric Voorhees called Venice.ai.
	both of those LLM systems have inference where they're not tracking your information, your privacy.
	You can talk to an LLM that's probably just as strong as ChatGPT or DeepSeek without giving your info to the CCP.
	So that's the first step.
	I'd like to talk to the first one you mentioned, especially because we'd like to just give them our upcoming LLM.
	Because we have a lot of people asking if we can host it.
	And I don't want to host it because it's a non-commercial model.
	I don't want to charge people anything, but I can't host it for free.
	Somebody else could host it and charge a hosting fee.
	There's a lot of decentralized cloud solutions that are able to host it.
	These guys started as a decentralized cloud and now this is a new project where they've launched the LLM private attached to that cloud.
	I think they'd love this model because a lot of people want to ask health questions.
	Maybe even medical questions, you know?
	Exactly.
	Yeah, if you're not double-checking your medical results with AI, and you're just trusting the doctor, then you're just going in blind.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Is it Libert, A-I-L-I-B-E-R-T-A-I? Yes, yeah.
	So if you want to talk to the chatbot, it's chat.libertai.io right now.
	So you can check out from there.
	And it's from Aleph Cloud.
	How does AI, I'm sorry for interrupting, but I have to ask this.
	How is AI, I mean, from a trading standpoint, they just have to slaughter us.
	That's the next step I'm about to get to.
	So AI agents, think of all the possibilities of when AI agents actually have functionality to do things for you.
	Right now you're going to the LLM, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer, but then you have to go and do that thing manually.
	It doesn't do stuff for you.
	It can't just call the doctor and book another appointment.
	You've still got to do it yourself.
	Now we apply that to finance and blockchain.
	The AI agent is going to manage your portfolio.
	It's going to rebalance based on what you think and what you say for you.
	That is what's happening right now.
	I've actually just had a few interviews.
	A lot of the interviews in the last six months have been about AI agents and their functionality increasing.
	And now we're starting to see, yes, you can manage your portfolio through an LLM. You can just type to trade, they're calling it.
	We can speak to it, and then they'll be able to manage even more where they can balance and trade for you without you even saying anything.
	I can see a lot of applications for this, obviously, but I can also see It's reasonable to sell at a certain threshold of plummeting value.
	It's a reasonable thing to do to get out while you still have something left.
	Well, if all the AI engines simultaneously decide it's reasonable to sell, they create Wow.
	The crash.
	And they can do it in microseconds.
	That's the thing.
	So now you're flooding APIs with just sell, sell, sell everything.
	And I'm pretty sure a day like that's coming.
	It's going to be way worse than FTX. But also a learning experience.
	Maybe don't turn over all your finances to a machine.
	Definitely.
	Diversify.
	magic number, but they say 70% or more in Bitcoin cold storage, and your speculation is 5% or 10%, depending on how risky you are.
	So if AI does crash, yeah, you lose that 10%.
	But you're not putting 100% leveraged to the AI agent, trade it all.
	But I could definitely see something like that happening, where AI, there could be some malfunctions, or maybe they hack into the LLM and decide to trade to a coin that they own, or they decide to liquidate your funds for the sake of it.
	So we'll see.
	Well, All AI engines do hallucinate in some way little artifacts in the images or the videos or the text.
	They will fabricate fake citations sometimes or inappropriate citations or get the wrong dates on things.
	I'm wondering what that looks like in financial trading.
	To our audience, I think I would approach that with extreme caution.
	If you're going to use AI in managing anything involving finances, be very cautious.
	I've also said, never get an AI robot in your house that you can't physically defeat.
	Or never get a robot with opposable thumbs either, because it can use tools against you.
	I'm going to stick with open source.
	Non-cloud-connected AI robot dogs where I control the model, but not robot humanoids with thumbs.
	That's my limit.
	It's coming.
	By the end of 2025, there will probably be humanoid robots in some people's houses.
	Maybe they're early innovators, but this year.
	And they're going to be connected to the cloud, which means you're going to have a humanoid robot walking around your house reporting everything to the NSA. Kind of like what Roomba does with the vacuums with the cameras on it right now.
	It's like, hey, let's crawl around people's homes and look at everything.
	No, thank you.
	I've got too many guns laying around for that.
	I don't want all that.
	I just saw the new Roomba now.
	It goes up and down the stairs, too.
	It's got legs.
	It's got legs?
	That's not at all creepy.
	A vacuum that's got legs?
	It could defeat your dog.
	Well, maybe not my dog, but small dogs.
	Todd, what do you think?
	Are you going to get like a robotic stair climbing vacuum robot that can also trade Bitcoin for you?
	No.
	It can engage in FOMO while it's vacuuming your hallway at the same time.
	How about that?
	I'll bring in a raccoon from out back and that's about the extent of any dusting that my floors are going to get.
	Well, clearly, I mean...
	The world is changing rapidly, and I do believe that AGI is just about here now, and superintelligence is right around the corner.
	It's happening really quickly.
	And this is going to change everything in the AI realm, including the fact that the cost of cognition is going to go to about zero.
	So what's the value of human cognition for an attorney or a physicist or a chemist?
	That value becomes about zero.
	That's depressing.
	Yeah, right.
	Think about it.
	So if you're in the hard sciences like engineering or math or physics or chemistry, you're going to need to somehow uplift what you do beyond the parts that DeepSeek can do.
	You've got to stay on the cutting edge of AI to use it for your benefit.
	That's right.
	A prompt engineer, right Mike?
	Yeah, you need to be a great prompt engineer and you need to be a creator of projects.
	You need to be the initiator and the sculptor of projects where AI, they're your workers.
	They're doing the hard stuff for you.
	You don't need to sit down and do all the math.
	Let the engine do the math, but you're building a new invention that it didn't think of.
	Exactly.
	In the next few months, we're going to see the AI functionality really come into crypto.
	I'm already seeing it on some decentralized exchanges.
	There's always vaporware when there's a new narrative, and then it takes a while for the actual functionality to come in.
	For a few years, there's been some great AI coin projects that have multi-billion dollar market caps, and nobody really knows what they do.
	But eventually there's going to be something that actually comes in and does something great and hopefully it benefits the people who are into decentralization, holding your own funds, trading on DEXs, managing it.
	But it needs to go in a way that is in line with all of that and not just integrating the stock market into a chat GPT that's trading for you, but really you still don't own anything and you don't control anything.
	Let me bring in something else here about AI. I've often believed that AI, for the most part, I believe, is going to be just looking at market activity and then making predictive decisions based on the past.
	In the non-AI world, that's a technical analysis of markets.
	Elliott Wave people get into that all the time.
	And they're going to hate me for saying this, but I believe there is zero predictive value in technical analysis of the market.
	Zero predictive value.
	Because if there were, one guy would already own everything.
	And that has not happened.
	That what moves the market is not the past of the market, but rather real world events that happen.
	Changes in regulations, storms that wipe out crops, changing the price of commodities or cacao or whatever.
	Those are not reflected in the price history.
	I don't think AI can predict price moves any better than anything else because AI doesn't have access to the future.
	So what do you say to that?
	What do you think about that?
	Yeah, I guess it's definitely controversial.
	Yeah, it is controversial.
	Whether technical analysis has any value or not.
	I think it's got zero value.
	People draw lines on past charts and say, well, you drew the line in the past.
	Draw a line of the future, motherfucker!
	I mean, you can't do that!
	I'm sorry, but...
	I have a few friends that have actually developed algorithms, AI of some sorts, that can overlay on top of the charts and give you the signal.
	And of course, it can't give you the signal of the candle that hasn't come out yet, but it'll give you the signal of where the short-term trend they think is heading.
	and their percentage of success is fairly high.
	Nothing is ever 100%.
	There's no technical analysis that will be 100%.
	Whether they're in luck and there's some rhyme or rhythm to those algorithms, it's hard to know.
	There's too many factors inside the market and out, all of these other potential natural disasters and everything.
	I think where AI could come into play with that is quickly reacting to that.
	That's true.
	That's a really valid point.
	Quick reactions, faster than human.
	But I noticed a lot of the automated trading systems, even before AI, they just traded the trend.
	And what I heard from high-level people who were involved in what's called high-frequency trading, they said, the trend is your friend till the end.
	And then it's not your friend, and then you're screwed.
	But you're right, AI can help you react more quickly if you set conditions.
	Like, hey, there's a big surprise that happened.
	So reacting rapidly does make a lot of sense.
	I think it's probably not for most people to be trading, especially when you get to lower time frames, unless you want to spend all day on the computer.
	No kidding.
	And I also think that as an end user who's not the expert in this, there's got to be a hedge fund that's got quants who are the world's top math people.
	I think 99% of people that I have talked to that tried to trade in altcoins and the next Bitcoin of crypto, they probably would have been better off if they just bought Bitcoin and just held it.
	Cold storage.
	No trading.
	If you want to get more Bitcoin, just Work and get more money and just buy it.
	Just cost average into it over time and don't worry about it.
	And the same thing is true for gold, right Todd?
	I do not own any stocks whatsoever and I sleep so well at night because I don't worry about it.
	Over the years I just accumulate gold slowly over time and I don't worry about it.
	And that's it.
	And it's outperformed the stock market every decade for doing nothing.
	Yeah, and it'll probably continue, right?
	It's looking like the trajectories.
	And you don't have to research companies and convince yourself that you know something that somebody else doesn't know.
	You can query it, Mike.
	I mean, I went out back and I got my shovel and I dug up some of my fold and I asked it, when moon?
	And it started going from 2,000 to almost 3,000, Mike.
	It almost went to the moon.
	That's right.
	That's what you're saying.
	Yeah, I mean, gold's up 50% since...
	But what about when we start mining asteroids that have gold on them?
	The extreme cost of bringing that gold here is the prohibitive factor.
	But then, you're right, what if there is heavy lift anti-gravity propulsion tech that is three orders of magnitude less expensive than current tech?
	And probably AI would be the thing that comes up with that tech.
	Probably.
	And then you could capture asteroids and bring them.
	But how do you bring an asteroid to Earth without slamming into the Earth and causing a disaster?
	Because gravity.
	I'm not worried about that scenario at the moment.
	We know there's no Bitcoin in the asteroids.
	At least I think there's not.
	We know that there's $21 million less when you consider the amount lost.
	But the same AI that comes up with anti-gravity tech could come up with quantum encryption tech that defeats the crypto in crypto.
	So that's the same kind of threat.
	It's been a discussion on whether quantum computing will be able to unencrypt Bitcoin.
	But the encryption is pretty strong.
	Both the encryption and the quantum computing to attack it will sort of both evolve at the same time.
	I don't think it will be able to break the chain.
	Especially Mimble Wimble.
	Yeah, but all the world's best mathematicians 10 years ago thought we wouldn't get to AGI until 2050. And now we have it probably now.
	And they were all wrong.
	The smartest people in the world.
	We're all wrong.
	All times change.
	The smartest economists in the world, the smartest stock investors in the world think Bitcoin is nothing.
	Yeah, they're crazy.
	Ashton, do you think the Trump administration will put a nail in the coffin of the CBDCs, the Central Bank Digital Currencies?
	Well, they said that they...
	I think there was some legislation that just came out recently.
	Maybe it was in Miami.
	In Florida, they're saying, you know, we're not going to let that happen.
	At least not the government.
	Yeah, it could just be, you know, Trump's, his company on the side does it instead.
	Liberty World, World Liberty Fi is the one that creates it.
	And yeah, it's not the government, but it's still there.
	Right now, what we're seeing with the two major stablecoins, you know, USDC and USDT. There's a bit of a battle going on between that.
	And USDC is sort of the closest thing that we have to a CBDC. They could easily make a partnership with the government and joint merger or something like that.
	There's a lot of legislation around that with Circle controlling it.
	And USDT, it's been around.
	It was around before Circle.
	That was the main coin.
	And it's not really as owned by the big folks that control everything.
	And they are trying to ban it.
	I think they just banned in Europe from last month, at least crypto.com.
	They just delisted USDT because it wasn't following the MICA European regulations.
	So I think it's great that there's options for stablecoins.
	And it's necessary, especially in decentralized finance or just in crypto at all, if every single asset is volatile.
	Where's the stability?
	We need something without having to go back to US dollar that we can have that we know it's going to be the same price tomorrow.
	I've always thought the problem with Tether is it's not a stable coin because the dollar's not stable.
	That's where buoyancy stable coins come in.
	There's been experiments with that too.
	Different assets backing the stablecoin.
	Not dollars, but a basket, a gold.
	I've seen many gold-backed coins over the years, and they haven't figured it out yet.
	No, because the physical vaulting and auditing is really difficult for anybody to trust.
	And they're experimenting with buoyancy stablecoins where it's staying on top of inflation, so it's a true $1, not $1 inflated a few years ago.
	But they're working out the kinks on that.
	I think a stablecoin is really critical for e-commerce also, for merchants.
	You don't want to take that risk as a merchant accepting it.
	But I don't trust Tether either because of the lack of really rigorous audits.
	And a lot of what they claim to hold are treasuries, and I think treasuries are going to be worth about zero.
	You say you have dollars, but you don't.
	You have debt.
	Treasury debt.
	And treasury debt is Based on the ability of the U.S. government to confiscate taxes from the American people.
	That's the only thing that has value in the Treasury.
	Even the Treasuries were created by owing money to the Fed, which is an international banking cabal that's not even controlled by the U.S. government.
	That chain of trust from Tether to Treasuries to the Fed, that breaks three times in my mind.
	I don't trust any of it.
	There are other coins that have sort of It's got to be on the right blockchain so it can communicate with Bitcoin and the other ones and it has to be on all of the exchanges.
	If it's only on one exchange and no one else uses it, then you're isolated to this silo.
	No one's using it.
	Very true.
	And Monero has that problem because it got wiped out of all these exchanges.
	And with the percentage of centralized exchanges right now versus decentralized, if those centralized exchanges say, we don't want that coin, then there's nothing that you can do at the moment.
	That's right.
	Yeah, and when Monero got dropped, I think, from Coinbase, the value of Monero really plummeted.
	And I thought that was crazy.
	I'm like, who's keeping Monero on Coinbase?
	Apparently a lot of people were.
	I had no idea.
	We're in this shift where I actually just interviewed Coinbase again this week.
	It's coming out, if you check on the show, they're head of advanced trading.
	They were talking about Base, which is their chain layer 2 on Ethereum, and also Coinbase wallet, and how they're looking at decentralized trading options, which I don't know how it could be decentralized if Coinbase is running it, and also about They're starting to talk about the future of stocks and equities being tokenized, which I think we're on the cusp of now.
	Once the Bitcoin ETF gets saturated and the big institutions are thinking, how can we make more?
	What's the next thing?
	Here comes the tokenization of the stock market.
	Let me ask you about the tokenization of government spending.
	This is where cryptocurrency can really be amazing, with all the transparency.
	With what's come out recently with all the slush fund crap with USAID and other agencies and what Doge and Elon Musk are doing exposing all this waste and fraud, I've been saying and a lot of people are saying that all government spending should be on a public blockchain where we should be able to surveil the government to look at it.
	Instead, what we've had is just a bunch of creepy black boxes everywhere, secret slush funds.
	Going into things that we would never want to fund.
	So the whole thing's been inverted.
	The government spies on us, but we can't see what the government's doing.
	But isn't cryptocurrency a really perfect use case to force the government to have all cash flows on a public blockchain?
	Definitely.
	I think that would be great.
	Elon wants to put it on the Doge blockchain just for the irony and comedic effect of it.
	We'll see.
	That's been one of the biggest use cases for voting, too, of course.
	One vote, it's on the blockchain, it's transparent.
	And accounting, of course.
	But the process in which that starts to happen, there's going to be some kinks that need to be worked out.
	How do we get them?
	Of course, they won't want to do it.
	We're already in the first steps of exposing the fraudulent transactions and why is 50 million going to condoms over here and there?
	Get rid of that stuff so then we can put legit transactions on the blockchain.
	But what the first transaction will be, maybe it'll be...
	Yeah, they could launch their own BitGov or whatever, and the only purpose of it is just to bring transparency to government spending.
	And there are enterprises, many that use private blockchains, which are not actually blockchains, but the enterprise Ethereum alliance works with Hundreds of companies that use private versions of Ethereum.
	They're permissioned.
	But it would probably have more transparency and accountability than the system that they're on right now.
	So if that's one step in the right direction, then we'll take it.
	But ideally, fully decentralized public blockchain that everything can be seen.
	Would that be cool, Todd, if we could just load up the government spending blockchain and just see where it's all going?
	Did you say BitGov?
	Yeah, I said BitGov.
	That would be perfect.
	It should be called BitGov.
	Yeah, why not?
	They'll have one giant wallet called Defense.
	It'll actually be like every secret DARPA mind control program under this giant wallet that'll get like $2 trillion a year, but whatever.
	We need transparency of government spending.
	Clearly, that's the case.
	So that's a great use case.
	Yeah, I think so.
	And we'll see...
	Doge is moving really quickly.
	And they say it themselves.
	We're going to make mistakes while we go, but we need to move fast.
	And Elon and Big Balls and the rest of the team are doing all they can.
	I think they're doing a great job so far.
	I think if you look at the U.S. debt clock...
	They have a new category for Doge, and they're at $84 billion saved so far.
	It's only been a month.
	$84 billion.
	So they're hoping to get to trillions in savings.
	And they will.
	They will.
	It's crazy.
	Because there's a lot of waste in the system.
	He made some arrests, right, Mike?
	Yeah, let the arrests begin.
	I mean, this is, look, actually, here's my political prediction, if you're wondering.
	It's related to all this.
	I think we're going to see a wave of resignations from Congress over the next two years.
	And what's actually happening behind the scenes is the Doge team finds that this money traces to this congressman, let's say.
	And then the DOJ goes to the congressman and says, hey, resign or be arrested.
	It's really that simple.
	You're going to see a wave of resignations.
	I think we'll see that in the next month or two.
	They're so fast.
	they already had the top five congressmen and members of the Senate and their salaries and their net worth.
	And they're like, you know, once Elon posts it, like, for example, this morning, there was a hit article out from Reuters on Doge.
	And he said, hey, Doge, investigate this.
	And it only took two hours for them to come out with 50 million.
	Yeah.
	It only took two hours to come out with $50 million to Reuters for social...
	It was a sign-up program.
	Yeah, it was just a program.
	It only took them two hours to just totally take them out once they put a piece on them.
	They're already looking at it, and it should be in the coming weeks.
	No, I'm familiar with...
	I mean, that's really cool.
	And Reuters did take millions of dollars.
	I think it was from the Department of Defense.
	It was to run...
	A social engineering PSYOP mind control experiment pretending to be the news.
	And that's what Reuters is every day, actually, it turns out.
	And Associated Press.
	That's why I love what you do and what we're doing here, because we're the independent media.
	We are willing, obviously, to say controversial things and ask big questions.
	And we're not paid off.
	You know, to push a particular narrative, right?
	Or to ignore a scandal.
	Because that's what happens all over media.
	They get paid, you know, like brought to you by Pfizer.
	Just looking for the truth.
	Right, exactly.
	Well, Ashton, is there anything else you'd like to add here as we wrap this up?
	I'm sure we're way over time.
	I apologize for keeping you.
	Oh my goodness.
	We're covering so much great stuff that I have no time.
	I have no time limit.
	There's so much to talk about and hopefully the viewers are still deep in this because this is juicy stuff and it's up to date and stuff is moving so fast since the Trump administration came in.
	You're so busy.
	Blockchain continues to build block by block.
	It's not going to stop.
	And they say if you're not keeping up in crypto then you're not trying hard enough because there's so much going on.
	Never mind the rest of the world.
	It's so fascinating, and that's why I'm so interested in blockchain, because it's the future and it's being built block by block as we watch it every day.
	True, true.
	Well, keep doing what you're doing.
	Let me plug your YouTube channel again.
	It's called Crypto Coin Show.
	It's on YouTube.
	Any other platforms where you're posting?
	Rumble, maybe?
	I do syndicate.
	I actually was syndicating to Rumble, Odyssey, but the Rumble syndication for YouTube was cut off.
	So we've got to talk to them.
	So we have to manually upload it.
	It's nice when you don't have to do it twice.
	I wish the channels were bigger than YouTube so we didn't have to use YouTube.
	But this is where we are.
	Well, you're going to have an AI agent on your desk soon that will do the posting for you.
	There you go.
	And tell it to post to Brighteon when that day comes.
	Definitely.
	Because we welcome you on brighteon.com as well.
	That's amazing.
	Yeah, you'll have the agent do it for you.
	No problem.
	And also, you have a substack called cryptocoinshow.substack.com.
	Yep.
	Todd, anything else you want to add here as we wrap this up?
	Yes.
	Ashton, do you think somebody starting now can create lasting wealth?
	Within crypto?
	Of course.
	I know people that started way after me and in months they've changed their life.
	It's just about taking action.
	You have to have faith and you need to take that step yourself as well and they'll meet you in the middle.
	It's never too late.
	That's one thing that I often hear about people that aren't in Bitcoin.
	And they heard it going up.
	They're like, ah, it's probably too late.
	Like back in 2017, Bitcoin's 21,000.
	It's probably too late.
	Next cycle, 70,000.
	It's probably too late.
	It's never too late.
	Even with just Bitcoin alone as one example, Michael Saylor's predicting millions and millions of dollars per Bitcoin.
	Everyone else predicting multiple hundreds of thousands.
	Even if you got into something and you doubled your money and it took a few years, At least you're in something that you believe in and is helping change the world for the better.
	After listening to you, I would say to our viewers, and I'm just being you right now, is if you want to get involved now, invest in Bitcoin, and then when you get kind of over your skis and you get really excited and you think you're smarter than everyone else and you're going to start doing the...
	The shitcoin trading and such, or the memecoin, sorry, trading.
	Just want what you have, which is your Bitcoin, right?
	And just keep it, keep it, and it'll keep going up and just resist the temptation to blow it on something else.
	Is that fair?
	Most of the time, that's how it works.
	And you know, if you're interested in a specific industry, all industries will be disrupted by blockchain.
	And crypto, whether it's to store data or do transactions.
	So if you have a particular interest, see how blockchain can apply to that.
	And make a difference in making the industry that you like more decentralized and more free.
	And for the people who are younger, get interested in blockchain technology.
	Because this is going to be the future.
	And if you are smart enough to just start following along and start understanding the language, you're going to be smarter than 99.9% of the rest of your peers.
	And you just never know.
	You might land on your feet doing something within blockchain technology and being that tip of the spear where you might get some unique insight to where all of a sudden you...
	And Todd, I would add, I love what you just said.
	I would just add to it.
	Everybody has to become competent in AI terminology, too.
	You need to understand prompt engineering.
	You need to understand how to use the AI engines to get what you want out of them and to understand their limitations.
	But yes, blockchain and crypto, it's a necessary knowledge area, I think, to function in our modern world.
	And AI, now.
	And if you don't learn these two things, you'll be left behind financially and you'll be left behind professionally.
	You'll be obsolete in a year.
	I have staff members that do video editing.
	I have intentionally given each of them a music video project task and said you have to do it with AI. And I've given them AI tools and subscriptions to do it.
	I said, you have to do this with AI. Forcing them, even if they didn't want to do it themselves, I'm like, you go here, you use Kling, you use Runway, you use these tools, you generate this with AI, you use AI transcription.
	And then they do that once, after a little bit of grumbling sometimes, they do it once and they're like, this is awesome!
	I'm like, yes!
	So now it's second nature, right?
	But that's the way it works with everybody.
	Same thing with crypto.
	First time you download a wallet, you install a wallet, you're like, oh my god!
	And the first time you have Bitcoin and you send a transaction and then the change disappears and you think you lost everything.
	You freak out, right?
	And then you wait for the change to come back or whatever.
	And then you're like, oh, now I get it.
	Then it becomes second nature.
	You just got to dive in and do it.
	There's no other way but to take action.
	Get involved.
	That's right.
	Exactly.
	Ashton, it's been a pleasure.
	Thank you so much for being here.
	This has been a ton of fun.
	Thank you for putting up with my questions.
	Todd and I both do this.
	We play a little devil's advocate sometimes just to see where your philosophy is and see what you're thinking about this.
	But we all believe in decentralization and we want people to get up to speed on all of this.
	Todd, of course, we'll take a quick break.
	We'll come back with the after party.
	But Ashton is free to go now.
	He's survived our interrogation for the last hour and a half.
	Good luck, Ashton.
	Thank you, guys.
	I really appreciate it.
	You were great.
	It was a pleasure.
	All right, so hang out, Todd.
	And for everybody watching, we'll be right back after this quick break with the after-party discussion.
	Stay with us.
	Join the official discussion channel for this show on Telegram at t.me slash decentralized TV. Where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
	Also be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on decentralized.tv where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published.
	On decentralized.tv, you'll also find links to our video channels and social media channels across all platforms, including Brighteon, Rumble, Bitchute, Twitter, Truth Social, and more.
	Check it all out at Decentralize.tv.
	All right, welcome back everybody to this after party for Decentralize TV.
	And of course, I apologize.
	I went way over time.
	I got totally lost.
	I was having such a great conversation with Ashton there.
	He's being so polite.
	He probably needs to go eat dinner or something, but he was just like chilling with us.
	So I went over time.
	I apologize.
	But man, wasn't that a really great summary of years of knowledge about crypto, huh?
	It really is.
	He has so much substance and he's just got such a nice way about him.
	And when you go to his channel...
	He's really easy to talk to.
	Yeah, he is.
	He is.
	And, you know, we've done enough of these interviews.
	Some interviewers are like pulling teeth and others aren't.
	And this one wasn't, you know?
	Right, right.
	No, he was really perfect, yeah.
	Yeah, he's perfect.
	And so everybody, please go to the Crypto Coin Show and give him a like and a follow.
	Follow along.
	You're going to be smarter for it.
	And as we said during the show, that you have to be interested in this.
	You just do.
	Otherwise you're going to be left behind.
	That's true.
	And I think it's okay that I say this, but I asked him as he was leaving, I said, can we spider your channel and use all the transcripts of all your videos to train our next AI model?
	Oh, that's great.
	We've been given that permission by a lot of content creators, a lot of websites and publishers, etc.
	And he said, yeah, no problem.
	So we'll do that.
	It won't be in the model that we have that's about to launch, but it'll be in one summertime.
	Yeah, that's great.
	This is the first time I'm even saying this on air.
	We're also going to be releasing a reasoning model that has a knowledge base of our data set.
	Imagine DeepSeek R1 DTV version.
	Right, that's great.
	Right?
	That's coming.
	Cool.
	God bless the rest of the world, man.
	Yeah.
	I mean, imagine you combine our knowledge base with reasoning models that can think through processes.
	Yeah.
	Game changer.
	Wow.
	Yeah, good stuff.
	And of course, it'll be free and open source for everybody.
	Just like this show is free and open source.
	And Todd, we're coming up on Almost two years of doing the show.
	Can you believe that?
	I can't.
	I mean, I really can't.
	It's gone by so quickly.
	But boy, what a pleasure it's been, Mike.
	It's been really amazing.
	I've really enjoyed doing these shows with you, Todd.
	And we've had just an incredible assortment of guests.
	And you've made so many great suggestions, too, about guests like Ashton today.
	So we'll just keep doing that.
	And I want to introduce something new that we have released here.
	If you go to brightlearn.ai, and this is all free, but brightlearn.ai will forward you to this Brighteon page.
	We also have a channel on Rumble.
	But what we're doing, Todd, is we're taking all of my interviews, including these interviews for this show, but my other interviews as well.
	And you see all these thumbnails with the orange color?
	They're all interviews.
	And we take the transcript and feed it into our AI engine and we ask it to generate a narration script.
	It generates the narration script and then we use AI voices and AI illustrations to make a highlights video that tells the story of our interview.
	And we're doing it for...
	Right now we're working on current and going backwards in time through the year 2024. Man, that's great.
	So every interview we did in 2024 will be covered in this format.
	That's amazing.
	And the skill required to prompt all of that to do it, I have way more respect for now after trying my experiment this morning with Hedra.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, let's tell people about that.
	So I'm about to release a music video.
	Called Vaccine Zombie.
	And one of my graphic designers, I said, he created this really great video.
	And at one point, and now going back, Vaccine Zombie is a song that I originally released in 2011. But everything in the song has come true.
	And now we have all these AI engines.
	And with RFK Jr. being head of HHS, I said, you know, we've got to release the song again.
	So I used Suno to redo the music and vocals.
	And then I had...
	My graphics guy do the zombie music video.
	And at one point in the video, it looked like the zombie was trying to sing the lines.
	And I said, dude, you need to actually intentionally have a zombie sing the song with lip syncing.
	And so he found a tool called Hedra that does that.
	And so I sent you that video of, I think that was a test clip of the zombie lip syncing the song.
	It was amazing, yes.
	Yeah, like, freaky but hilarious, right?
	Yes.
	And then you said, maybe I can use the tool for my face, right?
	So tell us the rest.
	What happened?
	Yeah.
	So I woke up this morning.
	I was all excited.
	And I got my picture of me kind of dressed like this.
	And, you know, it's a good picture.
	And I uploaded it.
	And then I wrote.
	Basically, a 60-second infomercial for my575e.com.
	I thought, if I was going to use AI and succinctly describe what my575e is, it would be this.
	And it was, I think, really good, tight, informative text.
	And so then I went through the process, my picture I uploaded, and sure enough, it converted it, and all of a sudden, my picture came to life.
	And it's like, not even just moving the lips like this.
	No, it was like showing inflection where the head moved.
	You know, it's like...
	And the eyes and blinking and everything.
	And the eyebrows go up.
	And it's all about the vocal inflection.
	It was amazing, right?
	Right.
	So, I don't have that great of a self-filter.
	You know, so when I looked at it, I was just like, this is cool!
	And so I went down and I showed my wife, and I said, oh, look at this.
	I'm going to post this.
	This is an infomercial for my 575E. And she said, if you post that, I'll divorce you.
	What was wrong with it?
	Oh, it was just so bad.
	I posted it to a couple of friends, and they're like, Creepy.
	Creepy Todd, huh?
	Yeah.
	So I decided, okay, well, we're going to do a paired comparison.
	And I went into the studio where I am now, and I recorded it with just me.
	And then I showed my wife, and I said, no divorce attorneys, honey.
	And I showed it to her, and no, we're good.
	And as you were describing it, I was thinking there is a really great use case for it.
	Yes, don't use Hedra to replace yourself, because you have you.
	You can always film you.
	Right.
	But what you don't have is, like, imaginary creatures that could be part of this message.
	Like, what if your message was, like, the IRS can really be a demon, and then you have a demon talking about, you know, we're going to come audit your taxes, and it's this horrible flaming demon.
	Like, Hedra would be really great at animating that.
	Okay.
	Right?
	That's a challenge.
	Yes.
	I tell you, and you have to be feeling this with Suno and your music.
	It's like food for your soul when you get into it.
	Oh, man.
	It's a ton of fun.
	It's a ton of fun.
	And then you can just, you're like, yeah, I didn't quite like that or didn't like how that sounded, and so you edit it a little bit, and then you just, you know, recalibrate it or whatever they say, re-render it.
	And, oh, it's so cool.
	So, it's a radical I'm going down.
	I've got a new song.
	I want to actually play a little clip for you here.
	I've got a new song.
	I'm actually rolling out seven or eight songs.
	Let's see.
	Oh, your songs have been so good.
	This one, but what's astonishing, I'll just play a little clip here.
	Yeah.
	This one is called Doing Alright, and the human-sounding inflections of the voice...
	Are just unbelievable.
	Like, you would never know this was AI if we weren't saying...
	Let me just play a few seconds, okay?
	This is really something.
	Check this out.
	Did you hear that?
	The point I was trying to make is that it's just like crazy...
	I mean, it's really human sounding.
	Yeah, it's nuts.
	The inflection, the emotion, everything.
	Right.
	I can almost visualize the person singing it.
	Yeah.
	So...
	At least in the realm of audio, AI has become really good.
	Now video and animating human faces is always going to be really difficult because we're very sensitive to the way, you know, facial expressions, like our neurology is really tuned into that, right?
	But just how far it's come in the last year.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I saw some of the Hydra examples, and it's...
	Astonishing.
	I mean, I think if I had a better photographer and if I was better looking, Mike, it would have been better.
	Hedra, hedra, on the wall.
	Who's the fairest of them all?
	Make me look good again.
	And it replaces us with Brad Pitt.
	That's not what I meant.
	But AI, I mean, there's no question it's going to change so much of our world.
	And also, Getting back to crypto and our topic today, I think that Trump is doing some kind of a big currency reset, frankly.
	And I think he's got a plan for some kind of digital system to play a role.
	Not a CBDC, that he's not going to do that.
	Some kind of a digital system.
	And frankly, we need something that is a digital system backed by something.
	Like gold, maybe.
	Because this dollar system, these banks, they suck.
	Wiring money.
	I mean, they built that in the 70s.
	That thing's obsolete.
	Right.
	You know, Swift.
	There's nothing Swift about it.
	They should call it slow ass, you know?
	I mean, it's all outdated.
	We're ready for something new.
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, he's been there a month.
	Let's give him another two, three weeks to figure that out.
	Yeah, it's a big project.
	We get it.
	Totally.
	Oh, but anyway, what I was saying on brightlearn.ai, let me just finish this up.
	The blue backgrounds are books.
	So we're also doing this treatment to books.
	And this is called Shadow Government here.
	That's the name of the book.
	Or Poison Spring, The Secret History of Pollution.
	And what's great about this is we don't ask for permission from the book authors.
	Instead, these are reports about their books and we help promote their books.
	So we give a link for people to buy their book to support them and support the author.
	But we don't run around asking permission because we don't need permission to talk about somebody's book.
	That's perfect.
	But these are awesome books.
	We're going to do G. Edward Griffin's book, The Creature from Jekyll Island.
	And if you look at what we've been doing, like FedUp, an insider's take on why the Federal Reserve is bad for America.
	What a great concept for a book.
	And if you go in, I'm not going to play the audio here, but here's the illustrations, all AI illustrations with captions.
	So if you want to see a nice review, a nice report about this book, here it is.
	And these are all free.
	They're all available at brightlearn.ai.
	That's amazing.
	That's amazing.
	How cool is that, huh?
	I mean, you could just binge in there.
	Oh, man.
	And we're doing like four books a day.
	Are you really?
	Yeah, we're doing four books a day right now.
	So, yeah, I love watching these.
	All right.
	With that said, We're going to play your video clip about My575E.com, but tell us about what that is first before we get to the clip.
	Yeah, it's, look, if you earn income, W-9 or W-2.
	You're just going to want to pay attention.
	You're going to want to visit my575e.com.
	Now, there are 32 positive attributes of operating your own UNA, but just on the income alone, being able to keep more of what you earn.
	We now, Mike, it's really cool in the private telegram group that when somebody acquires a UNA, they get invited into that, and it's become a really, really good tight-knit...
	There's about 120 operators in there now.
	And all of them, most of them have come through DTV or through, if they've heard your broadcasts, and I've been on those.
	And they are like-minded people, right?
	And it's just so cool to see the fact that if you out there are wondering, well, it just sounds too good to be true or something, well, it's not.
	And there are a whole lot of people that are in there that have gone through the process.
	They've watched the 90-minute video.
	They've downloaded the PDF. They've reviewed it.
	Many, many of them have booked a private consultation with me so that I can answer their questions.
	And then they acquire UNA. And then they are getting a unique taste of freedom.
	So I encourage people, watch this little video at the end.
	And then just give it some consideration.
	Very cool.
	Okay, that's my575e.com, and you've done some amazing things with your website there, educational and unincorporated nonprofit association is what you're talking about there.
	So that's a structure that's definitely worth people learning about and checking out.
	And I want to mention here, what I've got going on is rangerdeals.com, where we've put together some discounts on a lot of third-party products that I don't sell, but I do endorse.
	Like ivermectin for pets here.
	You wonder where you can get ivermectin for your dogs or your goats or your donkeys or your unicorns.
	This works for unicorns too.
	10% off ivermectin for pets and unicorns.
	And lab verified goldbacks, etc.
	You can go through here.
	We've got various forms of gold and silver.
	We've got a number of different things.
	Above phone, the satellite phone store.
	Lots of discount codes, even on firearms and holsters and accessories and Nessa's hemp here, things like that.
	So check all that out at rangerdeals.com and use discount code ranger, typically, to save on these various offerings.
	If I self-identify as a unicorn, can I get ivermectin for me too, Mike?
	That's a conversation between you and your veterinarian, actually, it turns out, yes.
	It's like, well, hey, you know, some biological men want to go into a gynecologist and get treated as a woman, right?
	Like, that's still going on in America.
	So the doctor has to, like, play along, play doctor, imagination.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	Imaginary biology.
	So at least in Biden's world, you could go in and say you were a unicorn, but maybe in the Trump era, that's not going to fly anymore.
	Although unicorns do fly.
	They do.
	I think Trump's hitting control-alt-delete on a whole lot of that.
	I think it's time to reboot that, indeed.
	If not blue screen of death, that whole thing, like a Windows computer shutting down.
	Bill Gates did give us something useful other than depopulation vaccines, it turns out, in death mosquitoes.
	He gave us the blue screen of death, the best metaphor for shutting down government.
	Okay.
	I guess that's it.
	So, Todd, any final words before we go to your clip?
	No, I think this might be our first two-hour episode, Mike.
	Oh, my goodness.
	I can't believe it.
	But really packed with information.
	A lot of knowledge here.
	Everybody, you know, learn about this and get up to speed on your skills.
	You're going to need it because tech is changing really quickly.
	Can I make a suggestion?
	A light suggestion that I think I would learn a ton from?
	Yeah.
	But at some point in time, in your own way, Maybe you could pull together a little education on prompt engineering.
	So some of us might know the tools that are out there, but we're kind of clueless.
	And maybe instead of reinventing the wheel, we could at least start playing with it with a little bit of guidance.
	I think that'd be a great value add.
	I'm glad you asked.
	Okay, so if people go to brighteon.ai, the website here, it will radically change right before the 1st of March.
	You can enter your email there to get access to the free model when it's available.
	But we're going to completely change this website, Todd, and I'm going to be hosting videos about prompt engineering.
	Oh, that's awesome.
	Yeah, just like how-to videos, how to get the results you want, how to use the language model for article generation, summarizing, expanding bullet points, correcting text, all kinds of things.
	Language translations, you name it.
	That's going to yield so much fruit, Mike.
	I mean, it really is.
	We're doing that because I can't wait.
	It's going to be awesome.
	I can't wait either, frankly.
	And this is the first model of many that we are producing because we're constantly, we have a pipeline of new incoming data like today, Ashton giving me permission to crawl his channel, right?
	And this happens all the time.
	So many, many people are giving me new data, new sources, and then we have to process that, normalize that, and then incorporate it into the training process, which takes a considerable amount of time.
	But over time, throughout the year, we'll have more and more advanced models, and my hope is that maybe by late summer we can have a reasoning model released also that will know the truth about, oh, dare I say, jabs?
	Perfect.
	And pharma, and who knows?
	Who knows what else?
	History?
	Yes.
	Got to be interesting.
	All right.
	So thank you, Todd, for the time today, and this has been a ton of fun.
	All right, Mike.
	Thank you.
	Have a great weekend.
	Can't wait to see you next week.
	Okay.
	You too, Todd.
	Thank you so much.
	And for those of you watching, again, check out all the episodes at decentralized.tv.
	I think you'll enjoy them and you'll find they are very informative and evergreen.
	Here we go.

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