{ "episodeId": "SLP448", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "texas_slim_jacob_wolki": { "name": "Texas Slim & Jacob Wolki", "role": "guest", "tag": "TEXAS" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.45, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin is making it easy for businesses to take on Bitcoin, whether that's onto the corporate balance sheet or helping employees get a certain amount of Bitcoin every month as a benefit. So if you're looking to add Bitcoin to your corporate balance sheet, Swan Bitcoin Treasury Solutions can make it easy for you to do this. You can automate your Bitcoin investment, custody, and management strategy, and you can have expert guidance every step along the way. 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This is an interactive community platform where if you are a builder or a product manager or a designer or an engineer, you can come together, there are events for you to network, there are mentorship programs programs to fast-track success, and it's also a community space to learn something new alongside other bitcoiners building on the future of Bitcoin Layer 2. So that website to sign up is buildonl2 dot com. Now, when it comes to securing your Bitcoin, you need to think about using specialized hardware. So software wallets are one thing when you're just getting started, but the cold card is a device that you can use to secure your coins for the long term, and this device can help it help you by making it easy to secure Sign transactions. So the coldcard is a little device, it looks like a calculator, but you can use it easily with, with wallets such as Specter or Sparrow or Electrum, and it has a range of features. You can initialize this device without connecting to the internet or to a computer, and it doesn't have to phone home for you to set up and generate a wallet. So that's a really useful feature. Go and get your coldcards over at CoinKite dot com and use code Livera for a discount there. Now, for the show today, my guests are Texas Slim of the Wolki from Wolki Farm. So we're chatting today a bit about Bitcoin and the connection with beef and the upcoming Australian Beef Initiative's first event. This is coming up on the 11th and 12th of February. So I thought this would be a great chance for any Australian Bitcoiners out there, as well as people around the world who just wanna hear about how the scene is growing and developing internationally, and I think you'll find this a really interesting show. Slim and Jacob, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "02:56", "start": 176.0, "text": "Thanks for having us. Hey, how's it going? Good to, So fast for us, I really appreciate that. It's the first time Jacob and I actually have done a podcast together, so, but we're gonna be, hanging out together a lot here coming up pretty soon." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:11", "start": 190.65, "text": "Yeah, that's great. I mean, yeah, 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, you know, get a show in and talk about the Beef Initiative, what's going on in Australia, I think one good way to start is maybe just to think about what, what are most people getting wrong about nutrition?" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "03:36", "start": 216.42, "text": "I think that we both- Don't hold. Go ahead. Yeah, right, exactly. You know, what, what we call-- I, I call it food intelligence, and we're lacking food intelligence across the world right now. You know, and we can trace it back. And I'll let Jacob, you follow up with this, but what happened, you know, we-- Let's talk in Bitcoin, you know, type of terminology here. W- What the fuck happened in Well, we changed food as we changed our, our monetary systems. What happened is we debased our food as long as the US dollar got debased. And in the United States, we really went, you know, there's a guy named Eric Butts, and he said, \"Hey, we're gonna go, fence to fence, and you're gonna go big or go home.\" In the United States, what we started doing was monocropping, and we, we took a lot of the, the strength out of the, the communities that basically grew our food and stewarded our food Our strength in our communities was through our food systems. That happened in nineteen seventy one. It 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, you know, 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 the lack of nutrition 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, you know, what, what, what are we getting wrong with nutrition? We don't have pure animal protein like we used to." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:16", "start": 315.55, "text": "Yeah, Jacob, do you wanna, add anything there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "05:18", "start": 317.55, "text": "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" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "05:29", "start": 328.96, "text": "patterns Diabetes, cancers, all the, 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, you know, the, it's, there's so- 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 really simple rules for food, and one is if it wasn't food a hundred years ago, it's not food now. So a, a Mars bar's not food. Twinkies aren't food, you know, you can consume them, but the best way to think about them is, is a treat, it's confectionery, it's, it's-- you can have it once in a while if you like, but it's not an everyday thing during Smokey at work. And the other rule that we have, there's two rules, the other rule is if, 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. Would, a-and, and if you wanna 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 a hundred 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, you know, peasant food was so gorgeous, like we've got rest- Restaurants in town, here where I live now, open up and they're calling their menus, like French peasant menu, and it sounds like this funny, sounds like poverty, doesn't it? But the food's so rich and elegant in its simplicity that we've, we've lost the intelligence, and that's such an interesting play on words with be- 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 Oil at home, an analogy I like to do is if you invited your, police friend over for dinner and he saw your setup to make vegetable oil, he'd arrest you for cooking meth in your kitchen. You know, 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, and it's so simple and elegant, it's, it's a beautiful-- I like simple things, make it easy for me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:53", "start": 472.92, "text": "Yeah, great. And I'm curious how" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:58", "start": 478.48, "text": "The keto and carnivore style of eating, and then we also have ideas like, you know, anti-seed 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, like, and then there are other people saying sugar is the worst thing. So how do you kind of look at those and which, which of those do you think is the worst factor?" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "08:20", "start": 500.27, "text": "Once again, that's kind of a rabbit hole right there within itself. What I always like to say is, you know" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "08:29", "start": 508.62, "text": "I mean, we can pit, you know, pick all these things apart, just like seed oils or, you know, 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, that really will, it'll keep you, you know, 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 Start and make it simplicity. 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, pa-pa- so what, man? Get back to the source 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've had Crisco. The heritage woman kinda was destroyed by marketing around food. Crisco was first invented because it was cottonseed and we weren't buying and making 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, you know, used to- Steward these communities to where you don't have to worry about seed oils and certain types of di- diets. Start with the foundation of what dense pure animal protein is or clean food, you don't, you, you forget about all the seed oils, you don't even think about sugar, you know? 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 out, that factor out of everything, there's not even a conversation to be had anymore, 'cause you're using butter, you're using dense animal protein, everything else is, you're using fruits that are dense and true, color in, in, in, you know, in, in as far as nutrition from, you know, what they are and where they came from. Well, you're eating the earth. I mean, that's what I tell people, keep it simple. You know, we overly complicate everything and we try to have these arguments, and, you know Yeah, it's, it's, 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, you know, consumption in my mindset or my analytical mindset or even my consumption as f-what food truly is anymore. I just don't allow it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:22", "start": 681.72, "text": "Fantastic. Jacob, anything you wanna add there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "11:24", "start": 684.12, "text": "If you wanna compare sugars, highly processed sugars and carbohydrates versus the seed oil- 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's bad for you, but you just eat the stuff 'cause it's delicious, and it's sort of like informed consent, you know? It, it's, 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 free that the seed oil thing is a bit more sinister because there's, there's 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 you know, data's bought, studies are bought, people are bribed continuously. We saw that with the food pyramid, pyramid, and we've seen it with seed oils, and, and it just goes on and on. And it just, it, it feels worse to me what, what they're doing with oils than what they did with sugar, 'cause I feel like most people always knew that wasn't probably great, but it was just maybe worth it for them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:36", "start": 755.69, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. Right. The eighties and maybe the nineties, it was a bit, it was like a low fat paradigm, and, and now people are sort of coming back, and I think it's becoming more popular now, this sort of keto, whatever you wanna call it, keto, low carb, paleo, carnivore, whatever. I think most people in this space are kind of operating somewhere closer to, to that end in terms of how they think about food. And so, yeah, I wanna ta-- I wanna chat a little bit about the beef initiative now. So Slim, can you tell us a" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "13:12", "start": 791.81, "text": "A lot, and, and it's, it's a very kind of, it's a good question, but what I, you know, I like to ask people, you know, what their understanding of, you know, the United States Cattle Association is or the cattle industry is, the beef industry is, and nobody really knows. And so I always tell people, you know, the Beef Initiative is what you're gonna make out of it, because it's a form of, like I use the words food intelligence and beef intelligence, it's basically getting you back into a market access to where you can have relationship with the people that actually do want to feed you, exactly like Jacob and Wolki Farms, they're in Australia. And, 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 Initiative going against the American rancher, we're losing about forty percent of our ranchlands and of our ranchers. The average age of a rancher in the United States is sixty-three 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 isn't trying to, compete with the multinationals. What we're doing is we're creating an industry within an 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 giving the great American rancher a voice again that they lost whenever we went into this multinational type of food system. And what we wanna do is rebuild our communities and, and basically education, education, education, just like Odell says, Marty Bent says, we were just in Tennessee where we sat on the stage of the US Cattlemen's Association, we had talks about, you know, getting back to our communities exactly Giving that voice to the American rancher that is being lost. There's a war on beef globally, you know, 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 American ranchers are starting to come into the beef initiative. It's voluntarily, we have over a hundred and twenty 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 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 than 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, you know, 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, you know, a form of a, 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 gonna- We're gonna go over to Australia and I'm gonna tour over there for the whole month of February. We're having a big summit over there at Wolki Farms at Jacob's place." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:49", "start": 1009.04, "text": "Fantastic. So Jacob, do you wanna tell us a little bit from an Australian point of view, what does it look like?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:54", "start": 1014.18, "text": "It's very grassroots here. The way I fell into it was, I actually own a butchery, so 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 a abattoir, and we End of twenty twenty, purely out of necessity, because I realized through my farm selling direct to public that the other local butchers weren't gonna 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 the- This person's trim with that person's trim where integrity based farming 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 fifteen other local farmers, and that takes up a bit of-- probably just under half of our production, so about sixty percent's doing my own internal goods, and then the other forty percent's everyone else's stuff. And one of the gentlemen that I was processing for was a Aussie Bitcoiner, John T. 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 gonna 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 the, their names, the quantity, and 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, like, a-as a, I'm a relatively new Bitcoiner, and from the outside looking in, there's a lot of people, buying and holding, and it just, I'm not a buying and holding, I'm not an Investing guy, I'm a businessman, so buying and holding something doesn't resonate with me. I wanna put my money in 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, \"Uh, we are the Beef Initiative,\" and off we went. I said, \"All I'm in, count me in.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:21", "start": 1160.64, "text": "That's fantastic. And I'm also curious as well, because, the The kind of, 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, like, was there any similar kind of direction that the Australian government and Australian regulations went?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:46", "start": 1186.0, "text": "Well, the regulations suck." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:48", "start": 1187.54, "text": "Yeah. You" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:48", "start": 1187.72, "text": "know, there's no-- and, and the main issue with the regulation is that there's no allowance for scale. So, you know, a facility that would be slaughtering five cows a day is- Not the same thing as facility that's doing five hundred a day, which isn't the same thing as one that would do five thousand a day. Like I think we can all wrap our head around that. But just due, 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, it's onerous in a labor sense. Like, w- I don't, I'm not affording lawyers, to go through and make sure I'm complying with everything like, it's 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 want slaughtered eight, ten, twelve months ahead of time, to get them to the market. Like it's nothing, 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, you know, our vehicles have to be registered with the food authority and all of this sort of stuff, but there, there's no, like, America's fine Because there seems to be a bit of a contrast. In some states, you get permission, you've got Joel Salatin, Joel Salatin from Polyface Farm, that's allowed to slaughter ten thousand chickens a year in his farm without any compliance, but if he does ten thousand and one, 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." }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "21:22", "start": 1281.71, "text": "Yeah, to what Jacob" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "21:26", "start": 1285.99, "text": "United States, it is the biggest bottleneck for us to have sovereign ranchers like we once had, and that's because of the scale, you know, the lack of scalability downward to the smaller micro processors that the local communities, local ranchers, smaller ranchers, you know, we have, I, I'm in the Texas Panhandle right now. It's the belly of the beast of the mult-nationals. We have JBS, Cargill, National, and Tyson all within twenty miles of where I'm standing right now. I mean, they're processing five to ten thousand calves 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, you know, with the lobbyists and with the, you know, the people that actually, you know, 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 of that Jacobs done there in Australia is that, like, we have Cole Bolton of K&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 it a 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 pr- Processing center apparatus, you'll have to be waiting eight to ten to eighteen months. That just kills the rancher. You can't really put that time needed into the stewarding of the land nor the animal if you're letting somebody dictate to you whenever you're gonna 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, you know, that's, that's where we're going back to where our grandfathers We have two hundred and fifty four counties. We used to have two hundred and fifty four processing, small processing centers. That's what the Beef Initiative is bringing back, that understanding, that reflection, the education, and now, you know, we're consulting on processing centers here within the Beef Initiative in the states now, 'cause we do have guys that have successfully opened up processing centers or abattoirs or butcheries, just like Jacob is doing, and we're gonna replicate that and replicate that and replicate, and people are getting in line to be Be able to do that now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:57", "start": 1437.11, "text": "Great. And so could you guys just outline for listeners what's the difference gonna be in the beef product when it's sold as part of a beef initiative or similar?" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "24:07", "start": 1446.86, "text": "Well, I'll let Jacob go with that because he's doing it every day in real time and he's, he's hands on. I don't know if everybody's gonna get onto his Twitter and watch everything that he's doing 'cause he's really educating daily. So go ahead, Jacob." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "24:19", "start": 1459.37, "text": "So on our farm, my farm's called Wolki Farm, which is my surname, my family's name, 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, we like to have a lot of different things going on because that replicates nature, doesn't it? Nature's not this, monocrop, monoculture, you know? Efficiency based, when it-- 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 minutes, you'll start to understand what farms like us can, can offer in value. So our first, pillar, production pillar, part of our flywheel, is animal welfare, and animal welfare to us is People that have pigs in sow stalls, that a sow stall is a, it's there for the welfare of the animal to make sure it doesn't lay on its piglets. So it's, it's the, the welfare is measured on a metric of less piglets killed. 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, for the rest of their lives and make sure they never access the staircase. It's the same analogy. So like, of course, some, some piglets, you know, certain scenarios Die, unfortunately, it happens in the wild, it's part of the course, and you've got the same analogy with, 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, the, 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's adopting at the moment, that we're somehow bad for the environment and, and off you're overpopulating, you need a population control, and we see it all on Twitter, you see it all over the, the, the media. It's, it's self-loathing and, and what it's doing, like I've got two young boys, and I can only imagine that That they're the problem and they're bad. so, you know, the environment's really important to us because we are the environment and 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 ounces back and diversity comes in, 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, we're actually just going down the path now of getting nutritional testing on a bunch of our skews so we can actually back that up with data. But I get feedback nearly every single day from consumers that, their kids haven't been able to eat eggs because it gave them eczema, they haven't been able to eat pork for forty years 'cause it gave them stomach cramps, diarrhea All sorts of weird things, but when they're eating produce from my farm, all of these ailments 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 wanna build community, and number five, we wanna 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 re- Regen Farm or the Beef Initiative, and the way it works is we, we don't cut any corners and the price is the price. So 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 forty dollars a kilo, and most bacon off the shelf in the supermarkets, twenty or twenty-six dollars 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's 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's subsidizing the cost at the end, and then you've got poor working in-conditions for the staff, like who want-- most of my staff have all come from factory farms, and I tell you what, they're all, they're all, you know, praising the Lord that they're, they're thankful to be out working on pastures and, you know, having such" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:11", "start": 1750.65, "text": "model, and we're not making the environment pick up the tab, we're not making, the staff pick up the tab, and, and everyone's, we-- so what we're doing is we're trying to do everything the best we can, and then we price it accordingly. And it's not to say that we don't care about the price, I've done more price drops in twenty twenty-three than I did price rises, 'cause we are able to, i-introduce scale and build efficiencies, but I'm very mindful of the fact that I, I don't want any system Pick up the tab so my consumers can say, \"If it's not what we're about.\"" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "29:41", "start": 1781.28, "text": "Yeah, that was a really great way to put it. It really is. I mean, that's, that's a such a good-- I mean, it's, that's why I loved, 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, you know? And he talked about, you know, the flywheel, you know, I call it a vertical integration that has a, a circle" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "30:08", "start": 1807.5, "text": "Initiative, you know, 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 happened 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 regenerative, fully regenerative. And so what we want in the Beef Initiative, this isn't 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 based, that it is about animal welfare, that it is about basically your health, your nutritional fly, flywheel of energy, that, you know, learning and educating yourself on how Jacob, the operator, the producer, is doing it in Australia, we've got it doing in the United States. This isn't a borders thing, it's sometimes it's a geographical thing, and you have to make, you know, different adjustments. And that's why I love to, 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, we're worried and we're concerned about animal welfare, and what's more important than anything is that we need- You 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 eighty-eight percent 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 gonna point my compass instead of worrying about these nutritional, you know, diet plans that are on twelve- 12-month program of fiat kind of thinking that's like, okay, this time it's gonna be a, a new trend that's gonna save my health or it's gonna, you know, tell me what food is, you know, in a new way, 'cause they're bringing in food science. Food isn't science, science isn't food, food is biology in a way that people don't understand." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:26", "start": 1946.43, "text": "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 made 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 dot com slash concierge, use code Livera for a discount there. Now, when it comes to sending Bitcoin transactions, I like to use Mem- Mempool dot space to target my fee. So mempool dot 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 mempool dot 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 dot space Space offers additional features and customized Mempool instances you can have your co-your company's branding and increased API limits. So if you're interested in this, go and become an enterprise customer over at mempool dot space slash enterprise. And now back to the show. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit now about the Bitcoin aspect of it? I, I'm curious to hear, probably from Jacob, I think you're, 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 the kind of the way Bitcoin, people are, coming to, for, for this?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "34:31", "start": 2070.54, "text": "Yeah, I am pretty new on my Bitcoin journey, as everyone, I've heard about it, in 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. The, the thing, I, I understand the concept, I, I'm trading in Bitcoin now, so I'm buying and, and selling in Bitcoin, which I think, I'd encourage everyone, I know a lot of people love holding, my whole thing is like, we need to get this stuff working right, like if we, if you wanna use it as sound money, they'll use it as sound money, but The thing I love about it is the people that it's connected me with, I, I don't have to force sell a value proposition of sovereignty and self-reliance to people that are already involved in Bitcoin. You know, a, a lot of people when they go, \"Tell me about your farm, tell me about your produce, why would I buy yours? It's a bit more expensive,\" you know, sometimes it falls on deaf ears, and that's fine. We're not for everyone, we're, there's enough people that want it that we don't have to force the story, but on the regular, they're fanatics about supporting my business because they already know that we've got enough in common that I, 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. And I, I've, I'm having an absolute blast. The, the, 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, the conscientiousness that's coming out of it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:14", "start": 2174.16, "text": "That's fantastic. And Slim, I know you've done, 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." }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "36:25", "start": 2185.26, "text": "Yeah, I think we're kind of leading the way on that. I mean, we've been, our technology stack, man, we're, we're over Ranchers, ranchers aren't gonna, they don't, you know, I'll generalize here, ranchers, you're not gonna ask a rancher to go buy Bitcoin and he's gonna be convinced. A, a rancher wants to earn his Bitcoin, he wants to trade peer-to-peer, he's 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, you know, it It's based on value, transparency, authenticity. It's something that has been stolen, you know? 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. You know, 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 Operational 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 can 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 three percent, credit card basically fees to the rancher and chargebacks. Man, that, that adds up. So usually the first entry point for a rancher in the United States is has been, is that they're gonna eliminate that three percent, and they can change it like on a, in a split second. If they need to keep 97% in fiat, they can do that. They can keep that three percent that they're not paying to the credit card companies in a basically in their wallet. They don't have to worry about it. They're, in the long run, that saves up to be thousands upon thousands of ba- upon thousands of dollars. And then when you have a people that are pretty educated and wanna trade with you, like Jacob said, that say, \" Here, I wanna 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, as far as Bitcoin itself, because we're not there yet, man. We gotta innovate with Bitcoin. We can't sit on it. It's not gonna do anything if you just stare at It, so we had to put it to work. And, you know, I, I came up through big tech, and that, that sequence of events from the startups of online software to the dot com boom and bust, it's the same thing with Bitcoin. The adoption period takes time, but it takes innovation and iteration, it, 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 the O- App here in the United States with iBanks, you know, OpenNode, you know, BTC Pay server, we're working with these other Bitcoin companies and saying, \"Hey, let's get up, you know, let's, 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" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:08", "start": 2407.83, "text": "From your point of view, you know, have you found it difficult to use Bitcoin as part of your business or it's been, you know, you've, you've found people who can help you?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "40:17", "start": 2416.68, "text": "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, what's a sat, not interested anymore. I'm gonna 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 Away from Melbourne, which is an eight-hour round trip to attend one of my open days, which we had four hundred 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, \"Ne-try that one first, and then when I-when I see you next time, I'll, I'll help you set up this one.\" And having, you know, a bit of a Bitcoin mentor like that is, you know, was It's just about ready to go. We-- I've been, I'm about three to four years into my farming journey. Farming isn't my background, I'm, I'm root-- 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 e-commerce yet because we purely haven't had the volume. Everything's been selling out locally, didn't need to ship it into Melbourne or Sydney, 'cause I'm about, I'm sort of halfway between Melbourne and Sydney." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "41:38", "start": 2497.79, "text": "Actions coming up, we're acquiring more land and the website's coming up and we are gonna be accepting and trading, Bitcoin through the website and, you know, my developer who's in house, 'cause he works for my bicycle business, has found that really reasonably easy to plug and play." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:56", "start": 2515.6, "text": "Fantastic, well that's great to hear. And yeah, like 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 that right direction and teach you all the right- Things about, you know, non-custodial or self-custodial and all of these things. So let's chat a bit about the event coming up. So we've got this event, yeah, tell us a bit about the event coming." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "42:17", "start": 2537.06, "text": "Yeah, I love parties, an excuse to get people on the farm. You know, I, 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," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "42:38", "start": 2558.17, "text": "You, have as income related to your organic produce goes over to the organic board. I'm not interested in that. I under-th-this is greenwashing for big business because, you know, they're, they're happy to give away a percent to market perceived value on the shelf to the, you know, hundreds of thousands of people going through the supermarkets every week. This isn't in-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 learnt so much of, what I know and believe and what I know customers, want from my farm tours. So they're, they're, 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 crack of morning. We're starting at seven AM, I think, so everyone's gonna have to get out there bright and early. We're, we're starting early purely 'cause it's so hot and oppressive that time of year, in our area. And then we've got a couple keynote talks in the morning. Texas Slim here is kicking it off for the day to sort of some, set the stage. And then we have a couple local doctors. We've got Max Gilhane, who's gonna talk about metabolic health, and we've got, Dr. Pran, Logan Nathan, who's gonna come and discuss I guess he, he, he's gone deep down the, glyphosate, roundup, chemical, residual chemicals and how, and how they're poisoning landscapes and, and destroying health in people. And then we got a couple Bitcoiners, Izzy and John Tien, and are gonna give a bit of a, they, they're gonna- They're gonna offer the knockout punch, everyone else is sort of buttering them up throughout the day, and then they've got the knockout punch. then we're gonna have some beers at the end of the day. We're hoping to get about a hundred and fifty people for that. I'd be, I'd be stoked to have a hundred and fifty. The night before, which is the, the Saturday of the 11th, we've booked out a little restaurant in town, thirty people, and I'm working with the chef there, and we're gonna have a three-course meal all" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:54", "start": 2694.2, "text": "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, 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, 'cause I've, I've been going long enough and loud enough in my local community, but I sort of know most people that are interested in what we're doing. So to be, to be delving interstate and," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:24", "start": 2724.1, "text": "But, have you been to Australia before or is this your first time?" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "45:27", "start": 2726.56, "text": "This'll be my first time, and, you know, I bought a one way ticket, so here we go. And, you know, we don't know how long the tour's gonna be. Seriously, man, I'm taking my eighteen year old boy, and then we've got a Liz, you know, she, she's out of Charlotte, she did Huddlewing this year, she's been part of the Beef Initiative. So, man, we had five of those summons, like 'Cause we had one in Kerrville, Texas, we had one in Georgia at White Oak Pastures, we had one at one of our ranchers' ranch in Colorado, had it in 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 y'all better jump in because this is getting back to the core of who we are and shaking our- Brancher's hand is more valuable to anything. It's a power move right now, 'cause you develop these relationships, you basically help innovate back into something that's gonna give us strength. And so it's gonna be a blast going up and down, you know, the coast of eastern basically Australia, and, you know, not knowing for-- I, I think right now we have a couple of small get-gatherings, a couple of our friends there in, outside of Melbourne, we're gonna have start something there on the ninth, and then Jacob's place on the eleventh and twelfth twelfth. There's another one coming after that's gonna be the eighteenth. And so, you know, these, this is gonna spread. I mean, people are starting to figure out that this is kind of a good way to kind of get together, kind of, you know, the Bitcoin ethos, there is no borders. Well, there's no borders with food intelligence, beef intelligence, you know, 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. And Australia right now is definitely leading the way This up, and it's, it's amazing how we all got together. It's because of Bitcoin and Beef, and, you know, here we are. So I can't wait to get over there. And, you know, we've had success over in the States, let's go have success all over Australia." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:38", "start": 2858.33, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, look, as I, as I mentioned, I'm no longer in Australia, but if I was, I think, you know, this is a great opportunity. So any Australian listeners, make sure you check it out. So guys, where" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:54", "start": 2874.08, "text": "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, a, a clinic or a store and I, I read, 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 Before and when Musk took over, I thought, \"Oh, I'll 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 things and had a lot of fun, met a lot of cool people, and, and, and, and sold a lot of protein. Got people inboxing me a dozen times a day, \"Uh, what's your product list? Can I-- Do you accept Bitcoin? Where can you ship to?\" Heaps of fun." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:49", "start": 2929.0, "text": "Fantastic. and Slim, where" }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "48:54", "start": 2934.16, "text": "Dot com. It's our platform, it's where we sell the beef. It's, you subscribe to our Substack, you know, we're gonna basically, 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 gonna 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, you know, let's get this talking across the globe here, and Where I got started, you know, I knew the Bitcoiners were gonna be the place to start understanding Beef and Bitcoin, so it's, at moderntman on, Twitter, and then of course, beefinitiative dot com is the platform. And I've got a podcast that we're pu-pumping out too, it's called I Am Texas Slim, and, you know, we're gonna do a lot of recordings up until Australia, then when we're over in Australia. So we're gonna keep it going live. And Jacob does a great job. It's hard to Everything, and it's really education, so definitely follow us both, and we'll be tagging each other back and forth." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:00", "start": 3000.02, "text": "Fantastic. Well, listeners, all the links will be in the show notes. Jacob and Slim, thank you for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "texas_slim_jacob_wolki", "time": "50:05", "start": 3005.43, "text": "Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for having us, man. We appreciate it. Good to meet you, brother." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:10", "start": 3010.45, "text": "I hope you found that one informative and educational. Make sure to share this show, particularly with any Australian Bitcoiner friends you have, so that they know about the inaugural Australian Bitcoin Beef initiative event coming up Sunday 12th Available at stephanilivera dot com slash four four eight. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }