SLP448 Texas Slim & Jacob Wolki – Bitcoin & Australian Beef Initiative

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SLP448 Texas Slim & Jacob Wolki Bitcoin & Australian Beef Initiative 

Texas Slim and Jacob Wolki join me on the show to chat about what people are getting wrong with their nutrition nowadays, and how the beef initiative is helping. We chat:

  • Nutrition today and what’s gone wrong
  • The Beef Initiative
  • Regenerative Agriculture and the difference in product
  • Using Bitcoin w/ IBEX, OpenNode, BTCPay
  • Inaugural Australian Beef Initiative Summit Feb 12th

Links:

Sponsors:

Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Slim and Jacob, welcome to the show.

Jacob – 00:02:55:

Thanks for having us.

Slim – 00:02:57:

Hey, how’s it going? Good to get to this together so fast for us. I really appreciate that. It’s the first time Jacob and I actually have done a podcast together, but we’re going to be hanging out together a lot here coming up pretty soon.

Stephan – 00:03:10:

Yeah, that’s great. We should chat about that and all the stuff that’s going on. I know I’m not in Australia anymore, but I am an Australian, so I thought this would be a really good opportunity to get a show in and talk about the Beef initiative, what’s going on in Australia and all of this stuff. But yeah, I guess maybe if you guys could sort of set the scene a little bit. I think one good way to start is maybe just to think about what are most people getting wrong about nutrition.

Slim – 00:03:36:

I think that we both go ahead. Yeah, right, exactly. I call it food intelligence, and we’re lacking food intelligence across the world right now, and we can trace it back. And I’ll let Jacob you follow up with this. But what happened? Let’s talk in bitcoin, you know, type of terminology here. What the fuck happened in 1971? Well, we changed food as we changed our monetary systems. What happened is we debased our food as long as the US dollar got debased. And in the United States, we were really there’s a guy named Eric Butts, and he said, hey, we’re going to go fence to fence and you’re going to go big or go home. In the United States, what we started doing is monocropping, and we took a lot of the strength out of the communities that basically grew our food and stewarded our food from the past. That’s how we had our strength in our communities, was through our food systems. That happened in 1971. Progressively, we started introducing fake commodities here in the United States. And you look at the health of the nation, you look at the debasement of our food and the debasement of our dollar. We’ve basically cut out nutrition out of our consumption models. And that shows, especially in the United States, with the health of a nation that now is metabolically bankrupt. We’ve got all the proof in the world, and it’s basically because of lack of nutrition. There’s a form of nutritional starvation I don’t think anybody’s ever really seen before, and it’s really rearing its ugly head. So that’s kind of my introduction into what are we getting wrong with nutrition? We don’t have pure animal protein like we used to.

Stephan – 00:05:15:

Yeah. Jacob, do you want to add anything there?

Jacob- 00:05:17:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I try to do when thinking about these sorts of concepts and fleshing out, especially when you think about them for the first time. I just try to find patterns. And you look at chronic disease patterns at the moment, diabetes, cancers, all these sorts of things that seem so evident. And I can’t find supportive data that we had undiagnosed diabetes to the level that we’ve got diagnosed diabetes today, and where does that come from? And then you start looking about how we’re eating. Like Slim saying, there’s so much nutrition, calories, protein sitting on the shelves, but we’re all slipping in terms of health, and we’re just eating the wrong things in the wrong volumes at the wrong time. So in our household, we’ve got two young children, two young boys, and my wife’s pregnant with a third. And we have a couple of really simple rules for food. And one is, if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it’s not food now. So a Mars bar is not food. Twinkies aren’t food. You can consume them, but the best way to think about them is a treat. It’s confectionery. You can have it once in a while if you like, but it’s not an everyday thing during school or at work. And the other rule that we have, there’s two rules. The other rule is if we can’t make it at home, we don’t eat it. So when we’re going out and we’re consuming things, it’s just a really quick test. If you want to expand on that a little bit, you go, Could Grandma have made this? You can put the two rules in one. Could Grandma have made this in her kitchen 100 years ago? Or for a lot of people listening, it might be Great Grandma now, and they might need to do a little bit of research to see what that means. And you’ll find that people, peasant food was so gorgeous. We’ve got restaurants in town here where I live now, open up. And they’re calling their menus, like a French peasant menu. And it sounds like this funny, it sounds like poverty, doesn’t it? But the food is so rich and elegant in its simplicity that we’ve lost the intelligence. And that’s such an interesting player. Words with food intelligence is, ironically, we’ve lost the intelligence on how to eat simply. And everything we’re eating now is extremely complicated. If you’re wanting to use vegetable oil, if you’re wanting to make your own canola oil or vegetable oil at home, an analogy I like to do is if you invited your police friend over for dinner and he saw your set up to make vegetable oil, he’d arrest you for cooking meth in your kitchen. It’s not a straightforward process, but if you were making lard, like you can make lard to fry your eggs in as a byproduct of just grilling some bacon in the morning. And it’s so simple and elegant. It’s a beautiful, I like simple things. Make it easy for me.

Stephan – 00:07:52:

Yeah, great. And I’m curious how you guys have seen this as well, because we have, obviously, the keto and carnival style of eating. And then we also have ideas like antiseed oils, right? So don’t use the processed seed oils. Use things like butter, lard, ghee, these things instead. I’m curious how you weight these things. And then there are other people saying sugar is the worst thing. So how do you kind of look at those and which of those do you think is the worst factor?

Slim – 00:08:20:

Once again, that’s kind of a rabbit hole right there within itself. What I always like to say is acceptance and truth in food is the only thing that matters. We can pick all these things apart, just like seed oils or fructose, corn syrup or sugar or this poison or this poison. You can educate yourself and do this. I call it a circle jerk around seed oils, but really it’ll keep you being able to point fingers at, yeah, that’s bad, that’s bad. And you get in this analysis, paralysis. And most of the guys that I talk to, people like Jacob, people like all the ranchers here in the States, they say, we’ve got to just start and make it simplistic, get back to the source of the seed, of what nutrition is. Learn how to eat the earth again. If you learn how to eat the earth again, you start there. You cut out all that other deception that we’ve created within the fake commodity and subsidized markets. You can get stuck in these carnivore diets, these different type of Keto. So what, man? Get back to the sources of the seed, of what basically we came from. Like Jacob, I always tell people, start living like your grandparents. Did your grandparents have seed oils? Well, they might have had crisco. The heritage woman kind of was destroyed by marketing around food. Crisco was first invented because it was cotton seed, and we weren’t buying or using candles anymore, so they turned it into vegetable oil. So if you can accept where all of this stuff actually came from, it was taking that nutrition and that heritage out of our families and out of the education of people like Jacob and people that used to steward these communities to where you don’t have to worry about seed oils and certain types of diets. Start with the foundation of what dense, pure animal protein is or clean food. You forget about all the seed oils. You don’t even think about sugar. Jacob’s kids, they don’t say over and over again they want that sugar because it’s not around. It’s not even a mindset. Once you go down this rabbit hole of what really food intelligence is, and now what we’re teaching is beef intelligence. You take that factor out of everything, there’s not even a conversation to be had anymore because you’re using butter. You’re using dense animal protein. Everything else is you’re using fruits that are dense and color as far as nutrition from what they are and where they came from, well, you’re eating the earth. That’s what I tell people. Keep it simple. We overly complicate everything. And we try to have these arguments. And I have the Beef initiative. Yeah, it’s about beef for me. I’m from freaking Texas. But what this is about is pure food, clean, pure food, something that’s not industrial, something that’s not a fake commodity. And I just don’t allow any of that type of consumption in my mindset or my analytical mindset or even my consumption is what food truly is anymore. I just don’t allow it.

Stephan – 00:11:21:

Fantastic. Jacob, anything you want to add there?

Jacob – 00:11:24:

If you want to compare sugars, highly processed sugars and carbohydrates versus the seed oils. Probably based a little bit on my vintage and what I’ve grown up having been normal to me in my world, I feel like everyone has always known sugar is bad for you, but you just eat the stuff because it’s delicious and it’s sort of like informed consent. It’s pretty sinister when you start looking into the way a lot of these companies market and put themselves forward. But I feel like nobody’s, maybe they don’t understand how bad it is for them, but they know it’s not good for them. I would argue that in right now, 2023, that the seed oil thing is a bit more sinister because there are spins out there telling you that these are the healthier alternatives and they’re selling people stuff that’s destroying them. Health in the name of health. And it’s just so hard for consumers, especially people that are data driven. And this sounds a little bit heretic, but data is bought. Studies are bought. People are bribed continuously. We saw that with the food pyramid, and we’ve seen it with seed oils, and it just goes on and on. And it feels worse to me what they’re doing with oils than what they did with sugar, because I feel like most people always knew that wasn’t probably great, but it was just maybe worth it for them.

Stephan – 00:12:35:

Yeah, right. And over the decades, there have been different, let’s say, paradigms of what was popular. Right. As I understand from the maybe the 90s, it was like a low fat paradigm. And now people are sort of coming back, and I think it’s becoming more popular now. This sort of keto, whatever you want to call it, keto, low carb, paleo, carnivore, whatever. I think most people in this space are kind of operating somewhere closer to that end in terms of how they think about food. And so, yeah, I want to chat a little bit about the Beef Initiative now. So, Slim, can you tell us a little bit about what that is? So if the listener doesn’t really know what’s the Beef Initiative?

Slim – 00:13:11:

That gets asked a lot, and it’s a good question, but I like to ask people what their understanding of the United States Cattle Association is or the cattle industry is, the beef industry is. Nobody really knows. And so I always tell people, the Beef Initiative is what you’re going to make out of it because it’s a form of, like, I used the words food intelligence and beef intelligence. It’s basically getting you back into a market access where you can have a relationship with the people that actually do want to feed you. Exactly like Jacob and Wolki Farms. They’re in Australia. And once people understand that they do have market access, that’s one thing they don’t realize that they don’t have that much of anymore because of the multinational corporations that control food processing and packaging and distribution, is that we really don’t understand that. The American rancher right now has been, there’s a prohibition going against the American rancher. We’re losing about 40% of our ranch lands and of our ranchers. The average age of a rancher in the United States is 63 years old. We’re losing a generation of intelligence. And it’s not being replaced. It’s being basically hijacked by the multinationals. The Beef Initiative is not trying to compete with the multinationals. What we’re doing is we’re creating an industry within the industry that basically is based on food intelligence, that basically is saving children’s lives, it’s saving adults lives. And what it is, it’s given the great American rancher a voice again, that they lost whenever we went into this multinational type of food system. And what we want to do is rebuild our communities and basically education, education, education, just like Odell says, Marty Bent says. We were just in Tennessee. We were sat on the stage of the US cattlemen’s association. We had talks about getting back to our communities exactly. Giving that voice to the American rancher that is being lost. There’s a war on beef globally with this climate change. There’s so much propaganda. We eliminate all of that. And we’re giving people market access to education, to better their health, to basically look at heritage, see where they came from. And the American ranchers are starting to come into the Beef Initiative. It’s voluntarily. We have over 120 ranchers that are now in our platform, and people are finding them in their local communities. So what we’ve done is give market access to communities across the United States toward these ranchers actually have a new pillar of strength. They have a conversation. And then we brought in Bitcoin. As far as Peer To Peer transacting for beef and Bitcoin, these ranchers are adopting it because it’s better money for the beef industry in the United States. So once again, the Beef Initiative is very broad. But we’ve had five micro summits conferences across the United States that I put together at the end of last year. And then of course, we were able and lucky enough for us to meet up with the Australian guys and the farmers over there in Australia. And it’s just been a holistic kind of spreading of the same type of movement that is wanting to feed our families, feed our communities, leverage bitcoin and beef together and pure food, and bring a form of a decentralized food movement back into everybody’s spectrum, into their mindset. And we’re having fantastic success here in the States. And then, of course, we’re going to go over to Australia and I’m going to tour over there for the whole month of February. We’re having a big summit over there at Wokie Farms at Jacobs Place.

Stephan – 00:16:48:

Fantastic. So, Jacob, do you want to tell us a little bit from an Australian point of view? What does it look like?

Jacob – 00:16:54:

It’s very grassroots here. The way I fell into it was I actually own a butchery in my own processing facility. So we can’t slaughter our animals, but we can receive the carcasses that we raise on our farm and send to an abattoir. And we received them to butcher them. I bought that facility at the end of 2020 purely out of necessity, because I realized through my farm selling director of public that the other local butchers were not going to be able to support any meaningful sort of volume production. And they also didn’t care about my wants or my customers’ wants. Wanting to process meat slowly with care, wanting to do preservative free curing methods, wanting to have really nice, tidy, clear packaging where we cared a lot about integrity and not faking dates and not substituting this person’s trim with that person’s trim, where integrity based farm and things need to be as we’ve put them forward. And in my facility, I’ve got two full time butchers and there’s a bit of extra downtime where we can process on behalf of other farmers. So we’re processing for 15 other local farmers, and that takes up a bit, probably just under half of our production. So about 60% doing my own internal goods and then the other 40% everyone else’s stuff. And one of the gentlemen that I was processing for was Aussie bitcoiner John Tina. And he’s one of the guys that’s heading up the beef initiative. And that’s how I actually met this crew. They’ve reached out to me and said, can you process our meat in your butchery? And then we’re going to take it back to Melbourne. And he sent me his order sheet with how he wanted all of these boxes of beef packaged. And in the columns in one of the he had their names. The quantity of one of the columns was payment type and it was Fiat, BTC, BTC, fiat, Barter. And I’m like, this is cool. This is the first person I’ve actually ever met that has been willing to send and receive bitcoin. I’m a relatively new bitcoiner, and from the outside looking in, there’s a lot of people buying and holding. And it’s just I’m not a buying and holder. I’m not an investing guy. I’m a businessman. So buying and holding something doesn’t resonate with me. I want to put my money and my value to work. And interacting with these bitcoiners who wanted to earn and spend their bitcoin was really exciting for me. And then I asked them I just off the spreadsheet, I said hey guys, what’s going on with this? And they said, we are the Beef Initiative. And off we went. I said, Well, I’m in. Count me in.

Stephan – 00:19:20:

That’s fantastic. And I’m also curious as well because the same kind of idea that in America that let’s say the way the industry went in terms of only having a few large processing facilities and people you have to go through for that. I’m curious if you have any comment from an Australian point of view on that. Was there any similar kind of direction that the Australian government and Australian regulations went?

Jacob – 00:19:45:

Well, the regulations suck. And the main issue with the regulation is that there’s no allowance for scale. So a facility that would be slaughtering five cows a day is not the same thing as a facility that’s doing 500 a day which is not the same thing as one that would do 5000 a day. Like, I think we can all wrap our head around that. But due to the nature of the legislation, the code of conduct and best practice is written for the big boys and everyone else has to comply. And it’s just onerous in a labor sense. I’m not affording lawyers to go through and make sure I’m complying with everything. It’s just not the way small business works. So it’s hard here, but it’s not as hard as America. I listen to these guys, these ranchers in America talking about having to book their animals in that they once slaughtered 8,10, twelve months ahead of time to get them to the market. I can call my abattoir and drop off animals in a week and get them processed too. So there’s a lot of health and safety compliance and our vehicles have to be registered with the food authority and all of this sort of stuff. But there’s no like, America is funny because it seems to be a bit of a contrast in some states you get permission, you’ve got Joel, Sallyton Jet, Joel Salatin from Polyface Farm that’s allowed to slaughter 10,000 chickens a year in his farm without any compliance. But if he does 10,001 he has to invest millions and millions of dollars into this big facility and have state inspectors and packers there. So they sort of seem to have a little bit more freedom on one end and then a lot more onerous regulation on the other. We’re sort of in the middle yeah.

Slim – 00:21:21:

To what Jacob says. As far as the regulatory capture that has happened in the United States, it is the biggest bottleneck for us to have sovereign ranchers like we once had. And that’s because of the scale, the lack of scalability downward to the smaller macro processors that the local communities, local ranchers, smaller ranchers. I’m in the Texas panhandle right now. It’s the belly of the beast of the multinationals. We have JBS, Cargill, National and Tyson all within 20 miles of where I’m standing right now. They’re processing 5000 collectively a day and more millions of cattle every year. That cattle doesn’t stay in the United States, it goes overseas. And so you have all of this production and processing going on where I’m standing, and nobody in the community is having access to that beef. And that’s done by with the lobbyists, with the people that actually change legislation through money, through lawyers. And so it is a big bottleneck of basically for the rancher and the consumer. That’s what the Beef Initiative has done a lot of ways that Jacobs done there in Australia is like, we have Co Bolton of K and C cattle in Central Texas. He is our distribution. He is our processing center for the Beef Initiative. We’ve sold over half a million dollars beef through that processing center apparatus we call the vertical integration, from the soil to the grass, to the cow, to the rancher, to the processor, to your fork. We know exactly where that cow is, where it started, where it’s ending up. You can’t say that in the multinational processing center apparatus. You’ll have to be waiting eight to ten to 18 months. That just kills the rancher. You can’t really put that time needed into the storing of the land, nor the animal, if you’re letting somebody dictate to you whenever you’re going to harvest that animal. So it’s unlimited as far as the regulatory capture. And that’s what we do. We just circumvent around it. We just don’t pay attention to it. We’re not dependent on any one of those touch points. And that’s where we’re going, back to where our grandfathers did. In the state of Texas, we have 254 counties. We used to have 254 processing, small processing centers. That’s what the Beef Initiative is bringing back, that understanding, that reflection, the education. And now we’re consulting on processing centers here within the Beef Initiative in the States now, because we do have guys that have successfully opened up processing centers or abbatoirs or butcheries, just like Jacob is doing, and we’re going to replicate that and replicate that and replicate and people are getting in line to be able to do that now.

Stephan- 00:23:57:

Great. And so could you guys just outline for listeners what’s the difference going to be in the beef product when it’s sold as part of a beef initiative or similar?

Slim – 00:24:06:

Well, I’ll let Jacob go with that because he’s doing it every day in real time, and he’s hands on. I don’t know if everybody’s going to get on to his Twitter and watch everything that he’s doing, because he’s really educating daily. So go ahead, Jacob.

Jacob – 00:24:19:

On our farm, my farm is called Wolki Farm, which is my surname, my family’s name. And we do beef, pork, chicken, lamb, eggs, as five main productions. And then we’ve got some small things around the edge like a market garden and some beehives. But we like to have a lot of different things going on because that replicates nature, doesn’t it? Nature is not this monoculture efficiency based. Whenever you’re building something for efficiency, you’re losing all the resiliency out of the system. You start to become chemical dependent. So we have all these different animals on the farm and we have production models that we use on the farm and I call it our flywheel. And I think if I riff on that for a couple of minutes, you’ll start to understand what farms like us can offer in value. So our first pillar production, pillar part of our flywheel is animal welfare. And animal welfare to us is contextual. So you’ll hear out of these factory farms people that have pigs in sow stalls that a sow stall is there for the welfare of the animal to make sure it doesn’t lay on its piglets. So the welfare is measured on a metric of less piglets killed. Which sounds like a really nice piglet, right? We can make sure less people fall downstairs and hurt themselves by locking them in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives and make sure they never access the staircase. It’s the same analogy. So of course some piglets in a certain scenario die. Unfortunately, it happens in the wild. It’s part of the course. And you’ve got the same analogy with chickens and cows. I don’t believe feeding grain to herbivores is high welfare. I don’t believe cutting tails off lambs is high welfare. There are ways to circumnavigate these productions, these production little hiccups, I call them. And we just need to have farmers that value the welfare of the animal and are actually willing to challenge the paradigm. The second thing I call our environmental backbone, we are our environment and animals are our environment. So when I hear people say that cows are bad for the environment, it drives me up the wall because cows are the environment. And this self loathing that humanity is adopting at the moment that we’re somehow bad for the environment and overpopulating, you need to populate control. And we see it all on Twitter, you see it all over the media. It’s self loathing and what it’s doing. Like, I’ve got two young boys and I can only imagine that subtly coming into their life day after day telling them that they’re the problem and they’re bad. So the environment is really important to us because we are the environment. We need to work in with the environment. And the reason I call my production values a flywheel system is once you look after the animal’s welfare in the context of what that animal actually needs, the environment responds beautifully because animals are the environment. So when you have cows outside on your ranch instead of in a barn and you’re moving these cows from pasture to pasture quickly doing holistic management like what we’re doing, the environment bounces back and diversity comes in and you’re growing more produce in a healthier environment. The third production value is healing food. We believe that food heals people and communities. So we’re actually just going down the path now of getting nutritional testing on a bunch bunch of our SKUs so we can actually back that up with data. But I get feedback nearly every single day from consumers that their kids are not being able to eat eggs because it gave them eczema. They haven’t been able to eat pork for 40 years because it gave them stomach cramps, diarrhea and indigestion, beef gave them headaches, all sorts of weird things. But when they’re eating produce from my farm, all of these elements that they’ve dealt with for decades have disappeared. And so I’m very bullish on the fact that real food from real landscapes can be healing food. Number four, we want to build community. And number five, we want to be profitable. And if you can understand welfare, environment, healing food, community, profit, and how that gains momentum and keeps flowing into each other, that’s what you’re buying when you’re buying something from a local regen farm or the beef initiative. And the way it works is we don’t cut any corners and the price is the price. Of course our food is more expensive when you grab it off the shelf, but there’s no externalized costs. So just say my bacon in Australia is $40 a kilo and most bacon off the shelf in the supermarket is $20 or $26 a kilo. It’s not all equivalent, but let’s just say that, be that as it may, that cheaper bacon is being subsidized by cruelty to the pig. So that pig is picking up the bill for you. It’s cheaper because of the efficiency of the farmer in the sheds being able to save because the animal suffering subsidizing the cost at the end. And then you’ve got poor working conditions for the staff who want most of my staff have all come from factory farms. And I tell you what, they’re all praising the Lord that they’re thankful to be out working on pastures and having such a visceral participation in this beautiful production model. And we’re not making the environment pick up the tab, we’re not making the staff pick up the tab. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to do everything the best we can and then we price it accordingly. It is not to say that we don’t care about the price. I’ve done more price drops in 2023 than I did price rises because we are able to introduce scale and build efficiencies. But I’m very mindful of the fact that I don’t want any system or animal to pick up the tab so my consumers can save. It’s not what we’re about.

Stephan – 00:29:41:

Yeah, that was a really great way to put it.

Slim – 00:29:42:

It really is. That’s why I can’t wait to get to Australia to hang out with Jake because he has such a good eloquent way of explaining it in a very good visual way. And he talked about the flywheel. I call it a vertical integration that has a circle of energy. And that’s what it is. You keep that circle of energy flowing and it just builds on itself. And everybody that comes in through the Beef Initiative, we have so many different certifications, philosophies, protocols when it comes into animal production and stewardship of the soil, the lands and everything. And one thing that’s happening in the United States is it’s caused a lot of divisions within the ranchers producers in the United States, from all the way from the commodity route, subsidized route, as Jacob just said, all the way into the fully regenerative. And so what we want in the Beef Initiative, this is not a judgment. We all got here, how we got here. But we want everybody to work together, to basically get into a system that is regenerative base, that it is about animal welfare, that it is about basically your health, your nutritional flywheel of energy that learning and educating yourself on how Jacob, the operator, the producer, is doing it in Australia, we’ve got to do it in the United States. This is not a border thing. It’s sometimes, it’s a geographical thing and you have to make different adjustments. And that’s why I love to drip this next year that I’ll be traveling all the way around the world to find out how we do things in different places and how people can work together to educate each other. We’re connecting so many ranchers now within the Beef Initiative that are talking to each other, that have never talked to each other. And it’s because it’s decentralized and it’s based on one thing. We’re trying to basically improve the soil, the land, and we’re worried and we’re concerned about animal welfare. And we’re more important than anything is that we know that both of those basically is giving the health to our children back. It’s something that’s been stolen. US adults across this nation in the United States have proven it because 88% of us are now metabolically compromised. That’s because of our consumption. So there’s so much that goes into what Jacob just said that people can look at it and say this is a lifestyle, this is how I do this. This is where I’m going to point my compass. Instead of worrying about these nutritional diet plans that are on twelve month program of fiat, kind of thinking that’s like, okay, this time it’s going to be a new trend that’s going to save my health, or it’s going to tell me what food is in a new way because they’re bringing in food science. Food is not science. Science is not food. Food is biology in a way that people don’t understand.

Stephan – 00:32:26:

Back to the show in a moment. Now there’s been some recent controversy in the space about people losing their coins, and there’s been that argument to me that self custody is too hard. I don’t believe this is true. Unchained Capital can help you. You can self custody your coins, and unchained can particularly help you by upgrading your security to multi signature, meaning you hold multiple keys and unchained holds one of the keys. You can still spend unilaterally, and they can guide you through this process and help smooth it over so that you can hold your own keys without having to trust somebody else. And unchained capital have a program. It’s called the concierge onboarding program. So they can ship you some hardware devices, do a call, and walk you through this and set you up. And afterwards you’ll feel so much more peace of mind. So if you’re interested in getting an unchained concierge onboarding program, go to unchained.Com/concierge. Use the code Livera for a discount there. Now, when it comes to sending bitcoin transactions, I like to use Mempool space to target my fee. So mempool.space is a bitcoin explorer. It shows bitcoin blocks, it shows transactions. You can see second layer networks like the Lightning Network, and it also gives you some fee estimation. So I use it regularly when I’m doing bitcoin transactions. It’s even built into various wallets now. So mental space is a fantastic tool, and you don’t even have to trust a third party. You can host it yourself. It’s available on various full node distributions. And if you are with an enterprise, mempool.space offers additional features and customized Mempool instances. You can have your company’s branding and increased API limits. So if you’re interested in this, go and become an enterprise customer over at mempool.space/enterprise. And now back to the show. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit now about the bitcoin aspect of it? I’m curious to hear probably from Jacob. I think, as you said, you’re a little bit newer in terms of the bitcoin world. What’s it been like for you trying to come into this world and understand, I guess, kind of the way bitcoin people coming to you for this?

Jacob – 00:34:30:

Yeah, I am pretty new on my bitcoin journey as everyone. I’ve heard about it in the media and getting around town for years and years now. But I’ve never really had a personal connection with people that are knees deep in this world. And like I explained earlier, John from the beef initiative in Australia was probably my first real contact into it. I understand the concept. I’m trading in bitcoin now, so I’m buying and selling in bitcoin, which I think I’d encourage everyone. I know a lot of people love holding. My whole thing is we need to get this stuff working right. If you want to use it as sound money, use it as sound money. But the thing I love about it is the people that it’s connected me with, I don’t have to foresell a value proposition of sovereignty and self reliance to people that are already involved in bitcoin. A lot of people, when they go to me about your farm, about your produce, why would I buy yours? Is a bit more expensive. Sometimes it falls on deaf ears and that’s fine. We’re not for everyone. There’s enough people that want it that we don’t have to force the story. But the bitcoiners that I’m connecting to on the regular, their fanatics about supporting my business because they already know that we’ve got enough in common that I probably check a few of their boxes and they understand sovereignty, they understand peer to peer transactions and not worrying about onerous regulations in the middle. I’m having an absolute blast. The people and the communities and the attitude excites me more than the technology. And I think the technology holds all of that up. And I hope that’s not blasphemy to say in this network. But for me, it’s all about the vibe, the community, the conscientiousness that’s coming out of it.

Stephan – 00:36:14:

That’s fantastic. And Slim, I know you’ve done your fair share of trying to connect the bitcoin and beef worlds. Can you tell us a little bit about that? I know you ran some summits as well, as you mentioned.

Slim – 00:36:25:

Yeah, I think we’re kind of leading the way on that. I mean, our technology stack, man, we’re over a full year of trading beef and bitcoin and our technology stack is basically helped out. I don’t know how many ranchers. Ranchers aren’t going to I’ll generalize here ranchers. You’re not going to ask a rancher to go buy bitcoin and he’s going to be convinced. A rancher wants to earn his bitcoin. He wants to trade peer to peer transactional. He wants value for value. And so once you get the beef and the bitcoin discussion going, you don’t have to sell bitcoin, you don’t have to sell beef. You have two people that are already intentional. They want the same thing. As Jacob said, it’s a decentralized mindset. It’s based on value, transparency, authenticity. It’s something that has been stolen. I always ask everybody in the United States, it’s like, where’s the store of the value of the cow? Nobody can really explain to it because the value of the cow in the United States is in the USDA insurance policy. Well, it used to be in the land or in the cow itself, or maybe it was in the rancher. There was something there that you could identify where that value of the cow is. The rancher understands that this is a store of value that they can rely on, on a long term generational aspect that was stolen in the United States through the subsidization and commoditizing of our beef in the United States. And so whenever you can actually look at a new store value, you could have peer to peer transactions. A lot of the ranchers in the United States what they use it for, and through the Beef initiative itself, is 3% credit card, basically fees to the rancher and chargebacks, and that adds up. So usually the first entry point for a rancher in the United States has been is that they’re going to eliminate that 3% and they can change it in a split second. If they need to keep 97% in Fiat, they can do that. They can keep that 3% that they’re not paying to the credit card companies and basically in their wallet. They don’t have to worry about it. In the long run, that saves up to be thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars. And then when you have a people that are pretty educated and want to trade with you, like Jacob said, they say, hey, I want to be your partner here. I want to exchange value for value, bitcoin and Beef. Then you establish these relationships that are very strong and they become educational, they become something. And that’s what these summits actually prove, is that you get these two groups of people that now are one and they’re working together and that builds community, that builds adoption, that innovates within technology. As far as Bitcoin itself, because we’re not there yet and we got to innovate with Bitcoin, we can’t sit on it. It’s not going to do anything if you just stare at it. So we have to put it to work. I came up through big tech and that sequence of events, from the startups of online software to the.com boom and bust, it’s the same thing with Bitcoin. The adoption period takes time, but it takes innovation and iteration. Innovation and iteration. The ranchers now are helping us do that because they come with demands that they say, hey, this would be cool if we could do something like that. We’re doing all kinds of stuff. We’re working with Oshi app here in the United States with IBEX, open node, BTCPay server. We’re working with these other Bitcoin companies and say, hey, let’s innovate a little bit more, innovate a little bit more. And by using it as a peer to peer transactional system, we’re finding out a lot of ways that we can leverage into the future that does become a store value peer to peer transaction that they actually can leverage and they can say no to the Fiat world more and more as we move forward.

Stephan – 00:40:05:

Yeah. And Jacob, I’m curious, from your point of view, have you found it difficult to use Bitcoin as part of your business or have you found people who can help you?

Jacob – 00:40:16:

I struggle self educating with technical things purely because I find them boring. So that’s probably one of the reasons I didn’t get into Bitcoin earlier. I googled it. What’s a wallet. Lots of sat, not interested anymore. I’m going to go and do something that I know that I’m already good at and put my energy into that. And that’s where John did it. We worked wonders for me. He actually drove to my farm all the way from Melbourne, which is an eight hour round trip, to attend one of my open days, which we had 400 people come to the farm and do a farm tour and have a barbecue with me. And he helped me in person download a wallet. And he also handed me a hard wallet as well. And he said, Try that one first, and then when I see you next time, I’ll help you set up this one. And having a bit of a bitcoin mentor like that was a really powerful way for me to actually get along with it. Our ecommerce website is just about ready to go. I’m about three to four years into my farming journey. Farming isn’t my background. I’m grassroots retail. I’ve got a few other businesses, I own a restaurant, I’ve got a bicycle shop, a few different things. And the, we haven’t really pushed the ecommerce yet because we purely haven’t had the volume. Everything’s been selling out locally to need to ship it into Melbourne or Sydney, because I’m about sort of halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. But now we’re getting close to volumes coming through. Now animals, our production is coming up, we’re acquiring more land and the website is coming up and we are going to be accepting and trading bitcoin through the website. And my developer, who’s in the house because he works for my bicycle business, has found that really reasonably easy to plug and play.

Stephan- 00:41:55:

Fantastic well. That’s great to hear. And, yeah, I think it is a great point you make, that your bitcoin mentor is a key person. Right. They make a huge difference, right, because they can point you in the right direction and teach you all the right things about noncustodial or self custodial and all these things. So let’s chat a bit about the event coming up. So we’ve got this event. Tell us a bit about the event coming.

Jacob – 00:42:17:

Yeah. I love parties. Any excuse to get people on the farm. I am anti this is probably a strong comment, but I’m anti certification. We’re not certified organic or certified free range or any of these things. They’re onerous in Australia to be certified organic. All of a sudden, a percentage of every dollar of revenue you have as income related to your organic produce goes over to the organic board. I’m not interested in that. This is greenwashing for big business because they’re happy to give away a percent to market, to see value on the shelf to the hundreds of thousands of people going through the supermarkets every week. This isn’t interesting to me. What’s interesting to me is integrity based farming and having transparency. So the way that we market ourselves is, come to the farm, shake the hand of the farmer, which is myself and my crew. Do a farm tour, ask the questions. I’ve learned so much of what I know and believe and what I know customers want from my farm tours, so they’re probably the single most important thing as a farm system for us. And the Beef Initiative is just an extension to that. So we’ve got the first summit coming up on February the 12th, which is a Sunday, and it’s a two and a half hour farm tour at the Cracker Morning. We’re starting at 7:00 a.m., I think, so everyone’s going to have to get out there bright and early. We’re starting early purely because it’s so hot and oppressive that time of year in our area. And then we’ve got a couple of keynote talks in the morning. Texas Slim here is kicking it off for the day to sort of set the stage. And then we have a couple of local doctors. We’ve got Max Gulhane, who’s going to talk about metabolic health, and we’ve got Dr. Pran Loganathan who’s going to come and discuss, I guess he’s gone deep down the Glyphosate roundup chemical residual chemicals and how they’re poisoning landscapes and destroying health in people. And then we got a couple of bitcoiners Izzy and John Tianan are going to give a bit of a they’re going to they’re going to offer the knockout punch. Everyone else is sort of butter buttering them up throughout the day and then they’ve got the knockout punch. Then we can have some beers at the end of the day. We’re hoping to get about 150 people for that. I’d be stoked to have 150 the night before, which is the Saturday of the 11th. We booked out a little restaurant in town, 30 people, and I’m working with the chef there and we’re going to have a three course meal or with our produce. And so that’s the sort of all the diehards who were traveling into the state and having to stay the night before. We’ve already sold a third of the tickets for that. We only launched them two days ago, so there’s some good momentum behind it. And I’m really excited about like, all the ticket sales that I’m already watching come through on Eventbrite, which is where I’ve listed the event. I don’t know any of them, which I’m really excited about because I’ve been going long enough and loud enough in my local community that I sort of know most people that are interested in what we’re doing. So to be delving into state and spreading our tentacles across the region and meeting new people is really exciting for me.

Stephan – 00:45:21:

Fantastic in Texas. Slim, tell us a little bit about have you been to Australia before or this is your first time?

Slim – 00:45:26:

This will be my first time and I bought a one way ticket, so here we go. And we don’t know how long the tour is going to be. Seriously, man, I’m taking my 18 year old boy. And then we’ve got Liz. She’s out of Charlotte. She did Hodler Wing this year. She’s been part of the Beef initiative. So, man, we had five of those seven, like I said, and each one of them are different. And to Jacob’s point, is it’s fun to look at the ticket sales, because we had one in Kerrville, Texas, we had one in Georgia at Wydo Pastures, we had one at one of our ranchers. Ranch in Colorado. Had a Tennessee at Bitcoin Park. So we’ve been back down to Texas, so everyone was across the nation. But what we always notice is that people are coming from Canada, coming from South America, coming from all over the United States. And I keep on telling everybody this is an international lifestyle, so you all better jump in because this is getting back to the core of who we are. And shaking a rancher’s hand is more valuable to anything. It’s a power move right now because you develop these relationships, you basically help innovate back into something that’s going to give us strength. And so it’s going to be a blast going up and down the coast of eastern, basically, Australia and not knowing. I think right now we have a couple of small gatherings, a couple of our friends there and outside of Melbourne, we’re going to have to start something there on the 9th and then Jacob’s place on the 11th and 12th. There’s another one coming after that. It’s going to be the 18th. And so this is going to spread. I mean, people are starting to figure out that this is kind of a good way to kind of get together, the bitcoin ethos. There is no borders where there’s no borders with food, intelligence, beef, intelligence, community building. It’s like, let’s make this into an international thing and let’s get everybody involved. Let’s go hit all the continents in Australia right now is definitely leading the way on that. And they’ve really taken this up and it’s amazing how we all got together. It’s because of bitcoin and beef and here we are. So I can’t wait to get over there. And we’ve had success over in the States. Let’s go have success all over Australia.

Stephan – 00:47:38:

Fantastic. Well, yeah, look, as I mentioned, I’m no longer in Australia, but if I was, I think this is a great opportunity. So any Australian listeners, make sure you check it out. So, guys, where can people get tickets? Where can they find you and follow you guys online?

Jacob – 00:47:51:

Well, Eventbrite is where we’ve listed the events. And if you just search Wolki farm W-O-L-K-I There’s a lot of crazy spellings. I’ve seen them all every time I go into a clinic or a store. And it sounds the simplest name to me, but it’s W-O-L-K-I farm. If you search that on Eventbrite, you’ll see our events and I’m all over the place. So just under my name, Jake Wolki or Jacob Wolki. I’m on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And I’m having a lot of fun on Twitter. At the moment. I’ve never been active on it before. And when Musk took over, I thought I would log back onto my account just to watch the subsequent happenings, just to keep up with it, instead of relying on second hand sources. And I posted a couple of things and had a lot of fun. Met a lot of cool people and sold a lot of protein. Got people inboxing me a dozen times a day. What’s your product list? Do you accept bitcoin? Where can you ship to? Heaps of fun.

Stephan- 00:48:48:

Fantastic. And, Slim, where can people find you?

Slim – 00:48:51:

Actually, the best place for me is Beef Initiative.com It’s our platform. It’s where we sell the beef. You subscribe to our substack. We have an upcoming event section on our platform as well that people can look at every one of the things that are happening in Australia. I’m going to keep everything updated as Jacob and everybody in Australia, so we’re making it easy access to get to their links to buy tickets or just spread it out. We want everybody to really spread this out, make it viral. Let’s get this talking across the globe here. And Twitter, of course, is where I got started. I knew that Bitcoin is going to be the place to start understanding Beef in bitcoin. So it’s @moderntman On Twitter and then, of course, Beef Initiative.com is the platform. And I’ve got a podcast that we’re pumping out, too. It’s called Im Texas Slim. And we’re going to do a lot of recordings up until Australia than when we’re over in Australia. So we’re going to keep it going live. And Jacob does a great job. It’s hard to keep up with him on Twitter because he’s always posting such quality content and everything and it’s really education. So definitely follow us both and we’ll be tagging each other back and forth.

Stephan – 00:49:59:

Fantastic. Well, listen to all the links will be in the show notes. Jacob and Slim, thank you for joining me today.

Jacob – 00:50:05:

Thanks for having me.

Slim – 00:50:06:

Hey, thanks for having on us, man. We appreciate it. Good to meet you, brother.

Speaker A – 00:50:10:

I hope you found that one informative and educational. Make sure to share this show, particularly with any Australian bitcoiners or friends you have so that they know about the inaugural Australian Bitcoin Beef Initiative event coming up at Sunday 12th. Show notes are available at Stephan Livera.com/448. Thanks for listening and I will see you in the Citadels.

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