Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode 15: Can Crypto Benefit Farmers & Offer Food Insurance for Consumers? Part 1 (with Dr. Donald McCullough)

Transcript

Episode 15: Can Crypto Benefit Farmers & Offer Food Insurance for Consumers? Part 1 (with Dr. Donald McCullough) · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: I came across a group of farms in Italy that have digitized ownership of their honeybees, their saffron fields, and their hemp fields, packaged them into NFTs and are now selling them on blockchains to people and selling full ownership rights of these uh assets to people.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that probably doesn't make much sense at the moment, so I threw out some jargon there.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: I figure I give the punchline first, and now we'll get into a little, maybe a little bit of background, and hopefully by the end of this, that'll make sense of what they're doing here.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Beyond Labels.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Stina McCullough, and I'm here with my co-host, the one and only Joel Salatin.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, Joel.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Hi, Sina.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited today because on our last conversation, we spoke about food inflation, and you mentioned an idea that I thought was fascinating, and that is farmers, like small family farmers, offering something like food insurance for people so that people can know that they're gonna have food for their friend for their families.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: And afterward, I found out that there's a farm who's doing something kind of similar, something very innovative, and they're using blockchain.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm skeptical of blockchain, as I know you are as well.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um in part of government overreach into blockchain.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but admittedly, I don't know much about blockchain.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know much about it?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, I don't.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I wish I did.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I get I get uh uh baffled every time I you know I encounter it, but I I do read articles about it.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I I try to, I mean it's it's just you know it's just out there.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I know there are there are people who absolutely think it's gonna be the future.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: There are people who think it's going to be, you know, the ultimate Marxist tool.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, uh and and so um you know it's one of these things, you know.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Warren, Warren Buffett has a rule.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: He says, I don't invest in things I don't understand.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of where I am.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh um, you know, I just my favorite story on that scene, if I can take just a minute, was was my my my dad.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: You of course, you know, my dad um has been gone a long, long time.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: But uh and and I I miss him every day still.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was truly my my you know my mentor.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he was he was an economic genius.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: He he he did tax prep, he was a tax accountant and did tax work for folks.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and his his goal was always to figure out a way to you know reduce your taxes.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um so he was he was truly an economic uh uh uh genius.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when he got sick and and thought that he might not live a lot longer, um he he began investing.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And and this is going back, you know, five or six years before he passed away, actually.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he began investing.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: His brothers had retired, you know, one was a executive at General Motors, one was an executive, you know, somewhere else, and and they had a lot of money.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I had these rich uncles, you know, and so they encouraged him, play the stock market.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we were just getting into where you know you you this this kind of day trading was beginning, and you know, about you know, uh whatever, 35 years ago.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so he started doing that a little bit.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he and I were out uh one day uh working in the woods, uh chipping uh chipping branches, I think, or something.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, uh this was before e-trade, okay?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you still had to trade with a stockbroker, but but it was becoming more simple.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they they didn't mind you uh you know trading more more common, you know, more uh uh aggressively and short term, you know, uh uh buying short term.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh so anyway, we came in about lunchtime and and had a you know message on the phone and uh it was a stockbroker.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: He called a stockbroker, and a stockbroker said, he said, Bill, dad's name was Bill, he said, Bill, if I'd have been able to call you at about 8 30 this morning, you could have made uh with what you had, you could have made$15,000 by selling.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: But since it's now noon, you've now lost 10,000.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that that that's how fast the you know the the stocks uh changed.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And dad looked at me, he said, you know what?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: If that's how if that's how it works, then I I'm out, you know.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And from then on, he invested in things, you know.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: We we did a survey of the farm so that we would know where all the mountain boundaries were.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: We built another pond.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: We I'm gonna invest in things I understand and know.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So long answer, but uh that's kind of where I am.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't mean I don't want to understand it, it just means I'm scared of something I don't understand.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: I feel exactly the same way as you, and this is why I like to invest in things like land, you know.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm I'm I'm on the same page as you.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but um, like you said, I do want to understand more about it because it is it there are reports that it is gonna be kind of taking over the system.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: So since we don't know much about it, I decided to invite somebody on the show who does know something about it.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: And luckily, I have a connection with him.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I was able to get him booked on the show fast and for cheap.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, man, that's that's my kind of deal.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's my kind of deal.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm paying him in hugs.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: He's thrilled about it.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, I'm talking about my husband.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the official introduction is our guest is Dr.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: Donald McCullough III.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: He has a PhD in chemical engineering from Lehigh University, and he's worked in numerous industries, including nutraceutical industry, renewable energy, and currently he works in finance and he studies blockchain for fun.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, welcome to the program, Donnie.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for those who are watching the video, I love the fact that Cena had to look at her notes to remember what it was I've done while we've been married.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: That is that's uh that's good to know.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's early in the morning.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: That is true, that is true.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, for those also not on the video, to increase my credibility, I wore the costume of someone who day trades blockchain.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I put on my hoodie sweatshirt so that I fit the stereotype of a blockchain, a crypto day trader.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I will say so six months ago, maybe eight months ago, Joel, I was in the same place.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: I always avoided crypto uh currencies.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: I avoided the stuff because I was worried it was a fad, if you will.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was worried about the government coming over and ending it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: I I thought it was like the modern day tulip, um, tulip frenzy from like the Dutch, you know, from several hundred years ago.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, yeah.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I avoided it, but sometime around April of last year, I had so I used to collect baseball cards, and Topps did something recently, had back in April, launched something on the blockchain.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, that's interesting.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Let me look at it.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And that got me to finally looking into blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies, and whatnot.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I was amazed by what I found.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, I was kind of kicking myself that I hadn't been looking at this years earlier, because especially for us libertarians, this is like a dream come true and a complete game changer type of technology.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, as you were talking about, Joel, it it's probably going to be both in terms of, yeah, it probably can be used as a Marxist tool and can also be a libertarian dream, just like any technology, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: It can be used for good and good for used for evil.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the reason I'm here today and I'm going to throw it out there in their speak is that I came across a farm or a group of farms out in Italy.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I can't find the name of it according to their white paper, but I came across a group of farms in Italy that have digitized ownership of their honeybees, their saffron fields, and their hemp fields, packaged them into NFTs and are now selling them on blockchains to people and selling full ownership rights of these uh assets to people.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that probably doesn't make much sense at the moment.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I threw out some jargon there.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: I figure I give the punchline first, and now we'll get into a little maybe a little bit of background.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And hopefully by the end of this, that'll make sense of what they're doing here.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I'll just chime in real fast.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: One reason we're talking about this is as he's as my husband said, there are farms already doing this, and there is a possibility that this could help farmers.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: So so first, let's go into um explain some of this verbiage that you just used.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: What is it that the farm is actually doing?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, what what are they doing on blockchain?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, what is blockchain?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: What is the farm actually doing, and how can this help farmers?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: I know that there's a lot of heavy terminology in this space, and that throws a lot of people off.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when I looked at it, I had to get over the terminology hump and I started looking at what does it actually do?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: How does it actually work?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I was trying to think of from a conceptual framework, how's it all actually go together?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I came up with there's three things that put together like cryptocurrencies and blockchains.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, the first one is the currency itself.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: How I like to think of it, it's an alternative currency.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: How I like to think of it is have you ever gone to like a school fair or something like that where they'll have like the little games or you can buy hot dogs and stuff, and you have to go buy the tickets, you have to go up to a window and you turn your money in for like one of those red raffle tickets, and then you use that as a currency.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like that.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna take your dollars and you're gonna exchange them for what they call coins or tokens.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And now those have two different meanings, which we won't get into, but you exchange your fiat money, your US dollars, for those, and then you have a currency that you can use in their ecosystem, in their fair, in their little um what not farm?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh their carnival?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, their carnival, thank you.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: In their carnival, while you can use there, and you can only use it there.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, why do they why does the carnival do those type of things?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why do they have those little raffle tickets that they go through?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Y'all, do y'all know one?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's I think so.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: So because because you if there are if there are numerous uh uh vendors um you know or or you know stations, you can spend that at any station.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason the reason it gives you access, it gives you access to all the stations that that uh agree to play by the rules of the carnival.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So it gives a common currency and also makes it easier for the carnival people, they don't have to take dollars.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: It also removes the instances of fraud that the you know, usually the carnival would end up taking a cut, if you will, of say everything that goes on there, and maybe they take 10% or whatever to fund the carnival itself, then they're not worried that the vendors are going to be pocketing the money.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: There's a record of it.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you have to come back and give us your tickets back, and we'll give you the money back in return.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, yeah, uh uh there's a a lot of our listeners may appreciate uh what you just said because at farmers markets, at farmers markets where the market takes like a you know an eight percent commission of sales, they're all the the farmers are always complaining.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that farmer lies about their sales, and that farmer lies about their sales.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a um that that just that that that's an example of um uh of the kind of tension that can happen uh you know in a in a setup like that, where there's a commission-based umbrella uh that's that's depending on honesty of its participants to you know to to fund itself.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I mean, from a conceptual perspective, that's what a cryptocurrency is, right?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you're changing your US dollars or your Euros or whatever currency you have in your home country, you're exchanging it for a in you, in essence, like one of those raffle ticket mutt types of money, a money that's been created off thin air for transactions at that location, in this case in a blockchain ecosystem, versus say at a carnival in real life.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that's the first thing to get across.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's a separate currency they have created for use within its own little ecosystem, if you will.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: The second piece is the crypto part of the word, cryptocurrency.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think about the fare, if someone really, when you have a if if they were working in higher dollar amounts, or if someone really wanted to, you could counterfeit those tickets, right?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: You could counterfeit those red raffle tickets.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You could go to Costco and buy your own role and start bringing them in and passing them around.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: You could print them, all this type of stuff.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you do have to worry a little bit about fraud, especially when you start getting into an ecosystem that can go worldwide and you have actors that don't know each other.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: At your local fair, people probably aren't gonna do it because they're neighbors and stuff.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go worldwide, someone in Singapore gets on, what do they care if they're gonna cheat someone in America?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're never gonna see that person.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where the cryptography piece comes in.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not gonna get into the details because even I don't understand them, but a lot of cryptography, the stuff that the military used for codes and code breaking, all that kind of stuff in the computer world has found its way into this to help kind of secure the currency so that it can't be uh duplicated.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's harder to make fraudulent transactions and it's harder to just create uh new coins out of thin air.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: You just can't go create a Bitcoin yourself and put it into the system because of the way the cryptography cryptography works, it's not going to allow it in.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of the second piece there, okay?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: You getting it?
• 13:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: So you it's like you can't just print money.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: You can just print, yeah.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: It makes it, in essence, harder to counterfeit.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, probably even harder to counterfeit than US dollars.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: If we all grew up watching those movies where people were creating briefcases of counterfeit dollars and stuff, it's even harder to counterfeit than those because they're able to use digital cryptography.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds sounds to me like we need to put uh we need to put the the the uh House Senate and the presidency on crypto if they keep being able to it keeps them from being able to print money, you know.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: That would uh that's exactly what I was thinking.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that yeah, that's that's one of the strengths, and we can get into it why a lot of libertarians have bought into this, but that's a large part of the reason is is that plus visibility, which we'll get to.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the third part is blockchain, and that's one of these fancy words, but it's really no different than I would say a log book.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: So for anyone who's kept a either a checking account book or has worked at a business where you've had to keep a ledger, that's in essence what this is.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: And blockchain is in essence a public ledger.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, how it works, that if let's go back to the idea of a log book or a ledger for a business.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: You actually have a physical book where you will go in and you will start ledgering.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I received this amount of money from this person or I paid this person, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you keep going, and each ledger build or each line in a ledger builds upon itself, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so then you just flip the page and you keep going.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: That is, in essence, what a blockchain is it is a ledger book that has been digitized.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is all the ledger, all the lines that have ever been included in this ledger in a row.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: They call that um, well, that that is the entire blockchain.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you equate in a ledger book one single page, so like all the transactions that would be on one page before you'd flip it, that's in essence what a block is in the digital cryptocurrency space.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: They can only put so many ledger lines into a block or into some amount of space in crypto.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they they create what they call a block, which is equal to a page in a ledger book.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: So someone records that.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Then they would, in essence, flip the page.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So they record it, it gets recorded out in the network, which we'll get to in a second.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then they would, in essence, like flip the page and go to the next page.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: The previous page, the previous block still exists out there.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the next block that's created is like the next page in a ledger book, it just continues where the last block left off.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: So just equate blocks to uh pages in a ledger book, and instead of the word book, it's a chain.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's a chain of blocks.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of being a book of pages, a book of ledgers, it is a chain of blocks.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all it is.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Questions, comments?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Makes sense.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's I mean, conceptually, that that's pretty that's pretty straightforward.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: And and and the fact that it's public uh means that anyone can audit um uh I mean most most businesses keep their ledgers pretty private, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't want all our finances spewed out over the world.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But if this is in the public domain, then imagine anybody could walk into a car dealership and I want to see your ledger.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Walk into you know, to the uh the the the sportswear store and I want to see your ledger and find out how many shirts they sold and and where they bought the shirts from and blah, blah, blah.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, so uh conceptually, yes, that's a that's a pretty dramatic, uh, a pretty dramatic uh whatever uh authenticating method for what is now fairly opaque in all business.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and obviously there can be concerns about people going in and being able to see your individual transactions.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: You may not want that, but in the blockchain crypto space, you have a wallet in essence, and you don't have to put your name, at least with rules that exist right now, your name isn't necessarily on your wallet.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: So people may be able to see that wallet ABC did all five of these transactions, but unless they know that you are a wallet ABC, they don't know who did them.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so it gives you some level of anonymity.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: But to your point, there are probably instances where you want to know what's actually going on, and it is all public.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: As I've gone through and started looking at some blockchains, and we've done a little bit of investing in two particular blockchains.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I really welcomed the fact that I could go in and look at everything, both the company, it's not a company, both the organization, the foundation has done, plus what all the other people in the blockchain have been doing to try to determine if it was a scam or not.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And after being able to research and look through, it was determined no, this thing looks real, it looks legitimate, it has real purpose, and it doesn't look like a what's called a rug pool where someone's gonna pull the rug out from you as soon as you put your money in.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I really appreciated that level of visibility.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that level of visibility does is let you look for bad actors.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: So there are people I have noticed that in a couple of the blockchains I look at, there are people that just spend their own free time kind of looking around to see what others are doing.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's a little bit nosy, they don't know who those others are, but they're able to see if something strange is going on.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And people will call it out like, oh, this person made a giant purchase.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now we don't know who that person is, but it's like, oh, what is that person doing?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do they know something?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do they do they just need cash?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then people start to speculate or whatever.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: But you can kind of see this stuff happening, unlike, say, in the stock market, where a big billionaire can just start going to sell his stock and no one knows it at the time.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: He has that level of anonymity.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: They have to come out at the end of a quarter and say if they moved a bunch of stock, but they don't do it at the time.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the price could crash because the billionaire knows something's wrong.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Additionally, it lets you um it well, with that with that level of transparency, it's allowing you to look for problems that are occurring.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, myself working at a large financial institution right now, not that there's a lot of problems, that's not where I'm going, but where I'm going is that you, you, as the customer, aren't able to see what exactly the money is going, where everything's going on at a bank.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so you kind of have to trust that the bank is doing the things that they're supposed to be doing.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's part of the reason why banks build these brands and build these big giant buildings that look authoritarian and everything is to convey that trust because you're not actually able to go into the ledger books and see what's going on.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one of the benefits here is that you don't have to worry about building that facade of trust of trust.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: You can actually go in and see it yourself.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, one thing that comes to mind too is um charities, right?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's been some charities that people have trusted, and then there's been corruption that went on.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: The money didn't go where you thought it was going to go.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so if it was on blockchain, you're saying you can actually see where the money's going, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, that would absolutely be something that could be done.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe charities will move over there.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you bring up a point.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Historically, you know, Bitcoin was the first of these cryptocurrencies, and all it is is money.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: It is just considered a uh a coin that's just money, and it has no other functional value other than that.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: They have been expanding in the blockchain stuff so that these coins can actually do more stuff.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: The one of the other big ones, the second biggest cryptocurrency is called Ethereum.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Ethereum was like the next evolution from Bitcoin because it's still a coin, but that coin can now hold what they call a smart contract, i.e., it can hold code that does something.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And what that will allow you to do is to actually host data on a blockchain that would then trigger if conditions are met.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: So the contract could say, if I pay you$100, you will send me um a house, a house deed.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know,$100 would be cheap for a house, but you'll send me a house deed and it'll all be done digitally.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so as soon as I pay$100 or$100 ether, I guess would be technically the way it is, into the into this pool, the smart the blockchain would see it, trigger the smart contract, and send me the house deed to you.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Let me.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: All right, why don't we use the farm example, the one that you Set up with you know the some of the farms in was it Spain or Italy?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Italy.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the farms in Italy are doing this.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: So why don't you give a walk us through, now that we know the terminology, walk us through what these farms are actually doing.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: So what these farms have done.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: So one nice thing about this whole culture as people are setting up blockchains and stuff, is it has become a common practice that they will write a white paper.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: They will write a paper that they publish online that says exactly what they're doing, what their mission is, what they're how they're going to do it, what technology they're going to use, what exactly is going to be delivered.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, some are better than others, but I came across this white paper for this farm, coming uh maybe a group of farms out of Italy.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: They're supposed to be organic.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I haven't been there and I haven't seen their certification, but supposed to be organic farms.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: And what they have done is to, in essence, divvy up ownership rights to parts of the farm.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: So let's take their beehive example.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: They have so many beehives, I guess, in the farm.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say how many, but they have they have, let's say they have one beehive on the farm.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: They have divided up the output that that beehive will create into, let's say, 10 pieces.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: They divided that up into 10 shares, if you will, using common stock market language, 10 shares of the beehive.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: They have put it as a smart contract, what they call an NFT, which stands for non-fungible token, which in essence is just like a card that has information on it, in essence.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that can be traded back and forth very cheaply.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they basically created a share or an NFT of the fraction of ownership of the beehive.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: So in this example, let's say the 10%, and they've then offered it to consumers to buy.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: So they offered it to consumers, consumers buy it.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so the farmer immediately gets money before the beehive has even done anything.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And now, so let's say I'm the farmer, I sold it to you for$100.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And now you I now have$100.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: You now have this piece that entitles you to ownership 10% of the beehive.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: So now I have$100.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been paid up front.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: I can then go work on the beehive and do my stuff on the side, but I already know as the farmer that I had$100 come in.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: I just know that 10% of the beehive's output I'm going to eventually send to you.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: You, as the owner, hold on to it.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, according to the white paper, I think they started selling them in April, and it was like harvest time was in August.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: So they sold it in April.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: You held it, you have an expectation that in August you're going to get some percentage of the honey that's made.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so the farm went off.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: They did their thing, they raised the bees, they had the honey.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then in August, they turned around and said, Oh, we created a hundred gallons of honey.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what a realistic number is, but let's say a hundred gallons of honey.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: All right, you, all my owners, you get it looks like Joel wants to laugh at my joke.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Even I was starting to laugh.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what yeah.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we all have our expertise in different areas.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: That is not mine.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: That was very kind of you, Joel.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: So one hive might generate uh three three gallons of honey.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I was gonna be off by more, actually.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So okay.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I mean it depends on how good it is, but you know, since since there's 10 owners, um, why don't we say five gallons if it's a really productive hive?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: These people gets a half a gallon of honey.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so they get half a gallon of honey.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens while the beehive is being is in processing and creating, you see, as the owner of this, can hold on to it.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: And it comes around to August after harvest time, you will get 10%.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: In this example, if it produced five gallons, you would get a half gallon of honey, and the farm would actually send it to you.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: Alternatively, during that three months, let's say your financial situation changes.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're you determine you can't eat honey, you decide you don't like honey, somehow you came across your own beehive on your property, and now you have tons of honey, whatever it is you don't want it anymore.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: You actually can sell this ownership right to the honey to someone else.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe honey goes in a sort of shortage, maybe the price of honey actually goes up.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: You might be able to sell it to someone else for a game.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you do it as a financial transaction, you start trading honey, honey futures, and all this kind of stuff.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but at the so maybe you sell it to Joel.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Joel wants honey and you don't need it anymore.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: So now you sell it to Joel.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now maybe you pay 10 bucks up front.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I can't, I keep losing track of my examples.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think I said$10 up front for the honey.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go with that.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: $10 up front.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Joel buys it.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, whatever the market price is, could be eight, could be 10, could be 12, whatever it is.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now Joel buys it.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, me as the farm, when it comes around to August, I've harvested the honey.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't go back to Cena.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I go to whoever holds that NFT, whoever holds that share of the honey.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Hey, I have your honey.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your portion comes out to a half gallon.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what this place is doing, they're then offering the customer an option.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: They say, Joel, do you want me to ship it to you?
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the shipping was uh included in the original price.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Joel can say yes or no.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: If he says yes, the the place he ships it to him.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I've seen some YouTube videos online where people were showing their buckets of honey that they got from ownership of this to legitimize it.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they were getting so you would get your honey.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: This farm's actually offering for Joel to say, No, I don't actually want the honey.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so the farm said the farm has an old contract, says, okay, I will go sell it at market value prices.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: I will take a cut of 20% of that, and I will send you the remaining 80% of what I got from selling that honey, and you now get the money, and the farm sends it to them.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: So that in essence is what this farm is doing.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing it with honey and beehives, they're doing it with saffron right now.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a new operation, it's all launched this year.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing it with saffron right now, and they're said they're gonna do the same thing with hemp, I guess, over the winter or spring, whenever the hemp growing season is in Italy.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you smiling at me?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I understand it.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_02: Joel, how are you understanding it much better now?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I am.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very helpful.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's dramatically helpful.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you you you um the the the last part though was a little bit of a curveball.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because um, look, I I think a lot of people listening to this program, uh, to the podcast, Cena, are very well aware of of typical like community-supported agriculture where you buy shares of a farm's output.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know, we we've been following the narrative, uh, Donnie, pretty easily, you know, as as a shareholder.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: But the idea of then being able to well, for first of all, to be able to easily move that share to somebody else, that's not easy because we have to sign six pages of of you know contract to to be a shareholder of something.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, like in Virginia with uh raw milk herd shares, things like that.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: There they're there's six pages of legal ease.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's very complicated and you can't transfer that ownership.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Very well, you can't trans all all you can do, all you can do is sell it back to the farmer who then has to reinstitute the six-page transaction to you know to somebody else.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it's it's it's it's uh it's it's a complex, it's a laborious, it's a laborious transfer if I want to change my mind.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I get that that's really slick to be able to do that.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: The um the the 80%, 20% um uh that's that's a little more touchy, a little more complicated.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but I appreciate that that allows me, that allows me to tap into, for example, an escalating price or a shortage, uh, then I can tap into that almost like a multi-level, not to not to muddy the waters, but almost like like a multi-level where I become a a downline uh uh a downline beneficiary of a of a price fluctuation that's in my favor that I want to that I want to actualize.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and there's there's so if I'm thinking about from the farmer's perspective, obviously in benefit, you get some money up front.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: You you right now as a farmer, you're putting in all the capital up front, you have the uncertainty of how much you're actually going to produce and how much you're actually gonna make down the road, not only from what the price is, but also the volume that you're able to create, right?
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and so this helps mitigate some of that because you're able to kind of sell some of it up front and create, as you said, like what'd you call it, like a community.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well what were you saying?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: The farm, the community CSA, community, yeah, yeah, community supported agriculture.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like doing that without having to have necessarily the community, ideally, and I'm not sure how they get around the contracts and stuff.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing because it's a digital asset, there's probably a way they can kind of get around some of that paperwork aspect that you're talking about.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's that's the number one benefit.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: The number two benefit I didn't mention when on these blockchains, like when Cena, when you would sell your ownership share to Joel, okay, the blockchain actually does take a cut.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like eBay, okay.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: It does it does potentially take a cut.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, the blockchain would take 10% of the sale, all right, and that would be divvied up.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so if you sold it to Joel for$10, the blockchain would actually take a dollar, okay, as the cost.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would get nine in this case.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: But of that 10%, I believe for this blockchain, six six percent, so sixty percent of that 10%, um, actually goes back to the creator of that share ownership card of that NFT.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: So every time one of these honey shares is traded, now in the future, whatever, the farmer actually is making a little bit of money.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: The owner makes a little bit of money.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if you were to sell it to Joel for 10 bucks, me as the farmer would make 60 cents every time that trade would occur.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if the honey prices go up and that thing starts selling for$20, well, now every time it gets traded, the farmer would now make$1.20.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: So from the farmer's perspective, you almost kind of hope that it's going back and forth ownership and they're trading around because you're going to make a little bit of a cut.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to be huge, but it's going to be a small extra revenue stream that comes into your farm as well.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that can kind of help pay for the fact that now you have to track that, oh, well, now ownership didn't go from Cena, it went to Joel, all that kind of stuff.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it can kind of help offset some of that cost or produce another revenue stream.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then the final one is this third piece.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I can see where that would be a curveball.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of struck me as well as the white paper, because you're reading through and you're like, oh, cool, they're selling ownership.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And what this does, it broadens it from not just your local group that knows about the farm.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the this farm over here in Italy, I'm watching YouTube videos from people in America.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: So they sent the honey over there, and people in America are eating this great Italian, the organic honey.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it it broadens that out.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I lost my train of thought.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the curveball.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the curveball, the curveball piece.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: It does create, it does financialize it a little bit.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it does complicate it a little bit, but like you said, you can see where the advantage comes in, right?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Either you're someone who doesn't need all that honey or you bought 20% shares, orver you don't need that much honey, but you're interested in making the income because you think honey prices are going to go up.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: So you're able to make a little bit of money.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: The farmer is able to make a little bit of a commission on being the one who has to go to the farmers' markets or wherever and find the market and sell it locally.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: So then everyone makes a little bit of money in that circumstance.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: What if what if all the bees die?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, well, the way it's written, you're out of luck.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like that, that it's it's spreading the risk around also to the owners.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: So owners need to take that into account when they're purchasing the the share of the NFT.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's possible.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Presumably, if all the bees die, uh I mean I mean there is no honey, uh then that would what that is that like a that would be a black mark.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: That would be a transparent, well, you can't trust this farm, they're not very good.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: This farm over here, their bees never die.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh we're gonna do business with them and we're gonna be a little bit scared doing business with these guys because their bees all die.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, it so so you you have a you have a you have a reputational within the within the carnival, if we go back to the carnival, you have a reputational uh uh a reputational vetting that happens by default.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Due to the fact that people know who can be trusted.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: The trust is built not on not on branding and and and and slick advertising, the trust is based on delivery.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because you would be able to go back into the blockchain and see that this person got delivered whatever, uh half a gallon of honey every year.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so, as you said, it should create more trust.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: You see the farms, you know, any farm there's gonna be risk, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: That something's going to happen, but you can go back and see, hey, this person has a record for the past three or four years, they've actually delivered honey.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, they've delivered more honey than maybe what was expected, or whatever, what the average is.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I'm gonna go buy a share of this one, or this this farm's shares that are out there might increase in price, right?
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: You're able to look at maybe two farms are out there doing the same thing.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this farm consistently gets five gallons per hive, this other farm consistently gets three gallons per hive.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, then it makes sense.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: This share should be more, and so the price will actually increase on this one.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: And like you said, it'll increase that trust versus the advertising versus me having to go over and say, Hey, how has your honey been the past two or three years?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: And trust the local farmer to be able to tell me what they've been getting, you know, to buy to buy a portion.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if we go back to our original question, Cena, which is I I loved, I loved your your I wrote it down.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I think your term is really wonderful.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, food insurance.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh our culture right now is in the jitters.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I just did a I just did a a books and brews uh uh book signing and and uh Q ⁇ A presentation sponsored by uh National Public Radio last night up in Harrisonburg.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and we had a bunch of people there, you know, and and uh a bookstore we were working with.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and um anyway, uh it was it was interesting that I think the second the first question of the of the evening when it opened up to the public uh question period was uh do you still have turkeys left?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um for you know for us.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Wendy, fortunately, Wendy was there because she keeps up with all that stuff.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I looked, I said, Wendy, you know, do we have she said we have four.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and uh you know, I don't think we've ever been sold out of turkeys this this early, you know, this much before normally we have plenty to go through Thanksgiving, and then you know, then you try to sell out by Christmas, you know, and if people want Christmas turkeys as well.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and the other farmers in the area are all experiencing this this run on turkeys.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, I'm going somewhere with this.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so so so so to to to bring this uh to to what we're doing, um if you want food insurance, if you want food insurance, we would have digitized, let's just suggest we would have digitized our our our turkeys um and and and started offering those for sale back in you know whatever April when we were buying buying the little baby pulse from the hatchery.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and and if you if you you know not that we wouldn't also have some for speculation, like you know, typical, but but but if you were the buyer of that April digital uh NFT, if you were the buyer of that of that turkey NFT back in April, you suddenly move to the top of the line above above uh people that come in later because you already have uh you already have ownership in that turkey from back then.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a way to create uh to create food insurance.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean I love that.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: I I've not heard that anywhere else.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Cena, I think you just coined a new phrase that might we might be able to popularize actually.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um because because look, you you buy insurance, you buy insurance for things that are unforeseen.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's just to me, it it almost blows my mind that in our culture of plenty, we are even thinking about a phrase uh that we're even thinking about food being something you need to have insurance for, as opposed to you know, fire damage, car damage, you know, health, all the other things that we buy insurance for to put food in that category is truly a uh it it's it's a paradigm shifter.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, in in that example, if we were to like take the the Italian farms example, Joel, how much do you uh roughly how much do you sell a turkey for at this time?
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, it's about uh depending on how big it is, obviously, but yeah, about 60 bucks.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so 60 bucks.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, back in April when you're buying chicks or figuring out your herd size, how how many turkeys do you roughly do a year?
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think this year we did almost 2,000.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you could say like a thousand up front.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: You say normally you sell them for 60.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: You could go in April and be like, hey, I'm gonna offer a thousand of the NFTs at 50 bucks a piece, maybe slightly discounted for the customer, but then you have the income coming in directly.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: You do that, you know that those first thousand are gonna go to those holders.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: You might do 2,000, the extra thousand, hopefully that you know you get up to 2,000.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's for you then to sell to all the last minute people.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: But then, yes, those people own the rights to a turkey come November.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: In between April and November, if they change their mind, they give up meat, whatever, whatever crazy stuff happens, they can turn and sell that to someone else.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: That right, you would get a little bit of a cut of that transaction.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then it comes around to November, those people would it's called burning your NFT.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_01: They turn in their NFT in essence.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: They come to your farm, they get the turkey, you ship it to them, whatever it is, and then you have the remaining thing to then sell locally to take advantage of price increases, hopefully, or if price decreases, well, you lost out on the potential.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, well, you you can you can see why these um why these uh I don't know what even what you call them, where all the the computers that run all this, you can see why these are massive computers to be able to handle that level of sophisticated trading, sophisticated transactions, you know, within the within the system.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um because on on the surface as a discussion, yes, it it does greatly simplify a lot of things, you know, compared to like the you know the clunky CSA paperwork.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but but to but but that clunkiness um takes a lot of computational capacity to to simplify elegantly to the point that you're describing.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now I will say that in that space, and I know blockchain cryptocurrencies have gotten a lot of negative press around energy usage and all that kind of stuff, they have been developing ways to decrease the energy waste, the energy usage and a lot of the newer blockchains, not Bitcoin, Bitcoin is the poster child for using lots of electricity, but um the other blockchains have started to use different methodologies that's greatly reduced the energy intensiveness of this type of thing and also reduce the overall computing power needed.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, but when you think about though, even in your example, all of the bookkeeping you have to do, well, that's energy.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: That may not be electricity, right?
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: But someone had to eat all that food to be able to move their hand and write all those ledger notes, right?
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, I I I I get that.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: I totally uh totally get that.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's been that's been really fascinating.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're we're about out of time here uh for this uh segment.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um just really appreciate your expertise in this and your ability to to dumb this down for our our uh layman's idea.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you know, so the question is if if Polyface wants to dip our toe in the water, um, can you help us navigate?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, where where does somebody like me get the expertise to dip our toe in the water on something like this?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say we have both farmers and and consumers uh obviously listening, and somebody like to dip their toe in the water.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: How do how do I how do I dip my toe in that water?
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I will say the the farm from Italy is on a blockchain called the World Asset Exchange, otherwise known as Wax.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're on the WAX blockchain.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that seems to be the one that this farm went to.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: With what I know right now, that'd probably be my recommendation of the one to look at.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you would need someone who knows how to program uh via blockchain.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, from what I've read, I don't, I personally don't.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I know how to navigate, I know how to look at the business side, I know how to do all that, but you'd have to find a computer programmer that knows has some experience in blockchain or is willing to learn it.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: I can't tell you how much effort it is.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: The way that they advertise on that blockchain doesn't sound like it's too bad, but what does too bad mean?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: But you would definitely need someone who has that experience to be able to do it.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I will say that that blockchain or a lot of blockchains actually are offering incentives for people to come over and set up businesses on the stuff.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're giving away things, especially things that are novel.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, so that's also an idea.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, if someone listening out there is a savvy computer programmer and uh maybe they can work with you and and figure out how to get it on there, and you guys might even be able to capture an incentive for being the first uh turkey uh turkey farm on there.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I'm thinking of a way to uh yeah, to offer uh a nice incentivized um uh commission-based uh consultancy outfit for somebody leaving their job because they don't take the vaccine.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this might be an excellent uh yeah, I I I really think there are the sky's the limit for the um the kinds of things that that people can do um that are that are leaving employment because of you know mandatory vaccines and things.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: So this is this is a great um this is a great idea.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: Joe, if someone if someone reaches out to y'all to programmer, so what I actually do at Capital One product manager, I'm the one who figures out how programmers should build things.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you guys find that program and knows it, y'all get in contact with me and we'll go figure it out.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds great.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds great to me.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well this is this has been a fascinating, uh, a fascinating discussion.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope we haven't left anybody in the dust here.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if if I could follow what I expect about anybody could, and uh just really appreciate your your expertise and your ability to explain that to us.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thank thank you very much.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and um I just want to add, so we didn't, I'd love to do a part two because we didn't talk about like some of our concerns with government um getting involved with it.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd love to go into that more detail um in the next one if you're up for that, Joel.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh is that a topic you'd entertain?
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and then and to to Joel and Donnie's point, if there is a computer programmer out there who's interested in doing this, um email one of us.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um my email's in the description box, or you know, leave your information um in um one of the comments.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Or go to Joel's farm and talk to him.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_02: Or go talk to them, but that's a local person, right?
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_02: So any, you know, we don't want to discriminate.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: My local, my local uh programmer.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we yeah, well uh uh it might be a little bit uh concerning if our um you know if our if our if the person that puts her hand up is from uh Chechnya or something like that, you know, it might be a little bit concerning.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: My local programmer.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I love it.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_02: We hope everybody enjoyed it, and we'll see you back here for part two.