EXPERIENCE 265 | “Becoming a Public Intellectual” with my friend Aaron Everitt

My conversation this week was with my good friend and returning guest, Aaron Everett. Aaron was just returned from a panel discussion where he represented the Maha perspective at the ASPPH annual meeting for academic public health, with hundreds of public health educators and attendants. Aaron has been a regular guest on a podcast known as Why Should I Trust To You is an avid freelance writer and creator. He's also a long-time chapter facilitator at local think tank. We discussed Aaron's creative journey on X, which caught the attention of then presidential candidate RFK Jr. and his journey from there to becoming a leading voice in the Maha movement, which has stagnated of late. We discussed the challenges and opportunities ahead for public health and then drift into a wide-ranging discussion, including the unfolding Iran quagmire and likely long-term consequences, music, purpose, and loving your neighbor. We enjoyed some whizz-cals and some foco-locos from our spirit sponsor, Seed and Spirit Distilling, and I'm sure you'll enjoy, as I did, my latest conversation with Aaron Everett. Welcome to the local experience podcast. On this show you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, and through it all you'll be inspired and entertained. These conversations are real and raw and no topics are off limits, so pop in a breath and get ready to meet our latest guest. My guest today at the local experience podcast is Aaron Everett, public intellectual. That's the first time I've ever been called that on kind of anything live, but thank you. Yes, well it's been fun to see your evolution this matter. It's been good. It's been a good couple of years. You were, I guess when you, I guess the right term for you when you were making all those video essays on your Twitter would have been at that time influencer, right? Trying to influence whether you were successful or not, who knows, but you were trying to influence the way people thought about things. For sure. Yeah, that was a very, that was a, I don't know why, and ask me that, my wife asked me that the other day, like, why did you do that? And I just, I actually couldn't answer that question other than I felt compelled to do it. And I felt like that was a really important moment in our history. Kind of one of those deciding points of like, will we be a republic or will we, or is that too far gone? Right. And I kind of felt like that election was about that. And for a little while, we had hopes that the Republic was getting stronger again, and now we're finally gone. I felt really good. I mean, a year I was thinking about this a year ago, probably a year ago, we were, there was just things that I felt like were really positive in the conversation. You're talking about, you know, government spending. You were talking about health and human services conversations. There were real, real things that you're kind of addressing. Yeah, Maha was getting talked about finally and stuff was going on. Yeah, there was some really good things with that, but I think it's been fascinating to kind of watch it unravel and unwind. And really, maybe the most, the most expedient demolition of a coalition that I've ever seen in politics. Well, they haven't confessed that it's demolished. Yeah. Well, of course, if you ask all MAGA Republicans, which by definition means that you are a, you agree with everything Trump does, and you ask him, do you agree with what Trump has done? Then of course, the answer's going to be 100% yes. That's sort of like asking a black man or a bunch of people in a poll, if you are black, and you are, and you ask only black people, will you be black? The answer is yes. So it's sort of a similar, but my Trump was elected was not that because of the Maha, the new Maha. There was a, many of whom had been Democrats as well. Most of them. I mean, most of them had been independent for sure. And in giant coalition of everything from sort of bitcoiners and, you know, have, you know, sort of health conscious people, but also anti-war people, you know, libertarian folks were really involved in that. So you had this massive generational coalition and to watch that sort of unwind as quickly as it has has been interesting and also good, but I'm happy that actually that Babylon B headline, which one? The Republicans continue to ignore everything people voted for them to office for or something like that. Well, that's very true. It could be, that could be a headline in the New York Times. I mean, that's a really good thing. Well, I just want any year, unfortunately, anytime. Yeah. I think that's generally how most people, interesting piece of that is I think most people all the way across all the political spectrum think that they're ignored. I think you could find the most left-wing person on the planet and they would say, I'm ignored by my politicians. You could find the middle of the road guys, you know, people that are coal miners in Appalachia, you could find people, you know, in wherever. And they would, and you could find super right-wing people and they would all say, my politicians don't ignore me. And I think that's this really interesting moment that we're in. So yeah, this idea that you could try to see if the Republic is still a Republic does influence. If you can keep it. Yeah, does the human democratic experience actually still have some legs and thriving behind it? I think that's what the conversation was much more about a year and a half ago when I was doing all of that stuff was really, are we here? Like, we are at a deciding point. Are we, are we going to be a democratic? Well, those had traction. Yeah. We were hearing all these stories about these tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars that were being shut down, USAID, AID. Right. And whether that was the right decision or not, it was at least exposure to a bigger conversation than we'd ever had. And that felt really good. That sort of felt like, okay, well, actually, maybe this is salvageable. Right. And, and then to be, you know, here we are doing another Middle East war. I guess, whatever. I guess Doge didn't get to the whole, like, Somali Autism Centers part of the conversation or Los Angeles. Meaning Center. Los Angeles Hospices. No, and I think that's, and, and maybe they were part of that conversation. At least, like, okay, there is something weird here with fraud. There is something there. So they may have put that seed in someone's head to be able to say, maybe we should go look at these things. Well, although some of them have been, like, publicly reported by these. Mail, yeah. You know, whistleblower is in Minnesota since 2017. They've been around forever and asking these things. You know, what is having with our, with our people? I don't know, man, I don't, I don't, I still, and I will say it forever. I'm not sure why we insist that we have to have 50 stars on a flag. I just don't get it. I just feel like we're very underrepresented. I feel like we're very well, because we couldn't dominate the world if we weren't tied this wall together. It's probably true. It is probably true. I mean, it might be good. It might be, but prefer if we don't dominate it quite so much. I feel like the American Republic on, on many levels is sort of like a 16 year old kid who gets keys to a kingdom or keys to a car that's like way over their head. Right. You know, here's your McLaren. Right. You know, and you can't really figure out how to drive it. You really don't know what you're doing. You're awfully inexperienced. You know, it's so fascinating. I'm trying to work on a piece right now between the end of the British Empire, which really happened at Suez, which is sort of 1956, basically Eisenhower kind of calls the bluff on the British Empire. They go in and try to take over the Persian Gulf. They try to bomb Egypt, try to take over Egypt and kind of colonize Egypt at the time. Okay. Okay. That's really the end of the British empire because Eisenhower says, no, we're not going. We're not participating with you. And Suez is a huge issue in the late, you know, sort of mid fifties. And it becomes this kind of worldwide crisis. And everyone really recognizes at that point between the sort of collapse of the British pound at that time, and this sort of misadventure in Egypt that that's the end of the British Empire. And I don't know that we're not in a very similar situation in which the dollar is super messy tied all the way to oil in the sort of petrodollar conversation off Bretton Woods. And now we're fighting over the straight of her mues. And you've got this kind of very interesting parallel one goal for part. The Saudi Arabian Peninsula part sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we're there. I mean, I think at the end of this, we will have surrendered our international power. And I think I would really be the outcome of this. To what as a notion of reserve currencies just be disrupted then or we could trust the United Nations really to do a great job. No, I don't know. I mean, it will be whoever steps in to sort of take over the space. But if you look at it, I mean, just I think intellectually, if you look at it and say, okay, well, we've got the American Empire is kind of pushing this. You've got these strange sidebar conversations about Israel and all the other stuff that's happening there. And I, you know, whether I have an opinion about that is irrelevant. I don't know any enough about it to know. But you have these strange sidebar conversations happening over here in that if the United States sort of pushing and forcing this issue. And then you have some players, China being one of them and Russia being on the other, sort of sitting to the side and being like, what if dad sort of shows up and says, quit fighting. And he solves that problem. Everyone's going to listen to dad. And that could be China. That could be Russia. Someone's going to step into that space to say enough. After we fuck it up more, you mean? Oh, yeah. I mean, with this inevitable, we're not, we're not getting out of this deal without some, some, some serious. This deal being Iran. Yeah, Iran, yeah. I think you're getting out of that. You don't think we could just control that straight region, make that part of our territory? No, I think they're too good at making missiles and we can't. I think it's that. We don't, we outsource everything in our defense department to China anyway. So like there is some sort of moment in which we're like, our manufacturing base doesn't exist at to the level. It needs to be to be in a pro long river. Yeah. Um, I don't think you're going to be in a position where over any course of any short period of time in which the United States can extricate itself from this thing. I don't see it. I mean, what now you sort of go in and do this and what's next? They didn't just quit. Right. You sort of killed their pope. You're not really just like disappearing. Yeah. So what next? Maybe we'll have some conversations and there's only a hundred million of them. That's only a very small part of the world. And Persia's the longest standing empire in that region of all of the countries. It's the longest standing group of people with a continuous or contiguous element of of nationality. So we're not in a very good position. Well, but I'm told that like 80% of the Iranians are actually pro US, uh, Western loving Persians. Is that which is that where it's too bad, man. I just, I feel disillusioned by politics. And I although there is a decent amount, but most of those Persians moved away, right? Kind of. Well, that's the piece of this, you know, you can look at the whole situation. And I think you could look at immigration across the West. I think you could look at the sort of, and I don't even know if it's demographic changes, but the sort of evaporation of native cultures, whether that's Switzerland, you know, Swiss people or Norwegian people or the United States, that sort of initial culture that they establish and create, that evaporation, I think, is is motivated by what we have done overseas. I think you see the consequences of obliterating countries. Yeah. Yeah. You leave them hopeless and helpless. And their only option is to go to someplace more stable. So there's this mass. Well, of our country too. Right. I mean, I was checking out the No Kings rally this weekend, and a significant amount of the vitriol is because of wars. Of course. You know, the continuing. The American people on, on whole, and I would say this is true, no matter what the war is, I mean, I think you will always find that this sort of remnant of political hacks that will say no matter what the leadership does in your party, they're going to do what they want it. You know, they're going to be behind it and support it. But that means that there's always going to be 70-65 is 70% of the American people who are not in agreement on the on the principle. And that that's really weird that our country is operated from a perspective of 30% of the people are dominating foreign policy. And that is that even, that 30% is motivated by even a smaller group of people yet, the sort of influencer people upon the politicians and whether that's the donation class or the sort of foreign policy class, you know, the think tanks, which, you know, well, hence the public intellectual introduction, I want to. Sorry, I just got talking. It was a squirrel chase. It's okay. And we can come back to it. But so you've you created this set of video essays. Yeah. A hundred of them are something right. That was about a hundred. Yeah. And through that, like, kind of supported RFK's democratic campaign and then the independent campaign and then ultimately the merger into Maha with Maga. Yep. You voted for Trump. Well, yes. I mean, interestingly, interestingly in Colorado, RFK was still on the ballot. And I couldn't pull myself to vote for Trump. So I actually did vote for RFK. But it didn't matter. But it didn't matter. I was only one of a thousand, only one of a thousand people probably in the state that voted for myself. Yes. Ultimately, I was in support of the whole thing. Yeah. I went to the inauguration. I was optimistic that something might come of it. And in the time subsequent to that, even as kind of when you've been creating more content, yeah, it was just the lonely hipster on Twitter. But within House and Habit and other platforms, as well as tell us maybe about this. You just came back from a panel panel policy thing in DC with, yeah. So yeah, I got once that I got very into writing. I've always liked to write. I've got very into writing. And then I thought, well, you know, maybe there's some opportunity to create video essays of the essay. No, there's going to be. No, there's going to be some ideas that are way too large. Yeah. How many words were they? Well, there are five minutes to 10 minutes long in a video, yeah. So each essay is somewhere between two and four thousand words is normal. But in the course of a year, like on my grammarly statistics, I'm writing almost three million words. So I'm writing a lot. You know, that's just that's more than some of us in your journal. Other stuff. Yeah, I mean, some of us just like, yeah, toss it out, whatever. But yeah, in it, in an average year, it seems like I'm writing about three million words. And I'd like to write, I always have, and it's good, it's good craft to try to figure out how to do that stuff. And I have my little sub stack called besides the revolution that I do stuff on. But in that, I've gotten, I've gotten the chance to write for some people that have pretty major sub stacks as well. House inhabit being one on their half million subscribers on her site. And then actually just reposted by a Caitlin Jenelina who is, she's the your everyday epidemiologist. So counter position from where I've been in my life. But we, I've actually gotten to know Caitlin pretty well through text and some friendship stuff. And I've gotten into this pool of people that are trying, I think, on their, on their best days to find agreement about certain things. And we've, and, and that particular one are the things that we as Americans, yeah, kind of agree upon. And they've started in, in the health space. And I think that's really good. I think that's an easy one to have the conversation about because I think most people agree with that. Hey, octopus. And we've got like an echo thing going on. Oh, okay. So anyway, they've started with the health piece. And I think that's a good place to start because most people really do care about that. And most people are in agreement that health care costs are too much that our medicine probably has some element of corruption in it. And our medical system has some element of corruption in our insurance system for sure. Our insurance system sucks. Our food isn't very good. We see that, you know, I sort of look down at your waistlines and you're like, yep, turns out we're not as healthy as we could be. So there's like empirical evidence in your body that sort of allows us to have these conversations. And I think that's been really good. So I was just in D.C. on a panel. Last week, I think it was supposed to buy who or what or what. I don't have an official thing. It has a thing. Yeah, it's a big thing. Actually, it was a American education. So these are all like all the heads of the departments of health, like Yale and Harvard and Brown and you know, the sort of public health. Especially the public health. Yeah, and education, particularly. So education elements of public health. Okay. And I got invited and went last minute. It was a very cool opportunity to go do it. But you know, these are the room is filled with people that I two years ago or five years ago where like these are, you know, dark-hearted people. Right. Well, I mean, there was vac passes and stuff. Right. I mean, it's like crazy stuff that wasn't fitting my life. But I've actually gotten to know a lot of these people in the public health space. And I've really enjoyed to realize, I think at the end of the day, kind of all of us want the same thing, which is that we want government to be a watchdog. Because to secure liberty, you actually have to have some layer of enforcement that people can't just be unscrupulous. Right. They can't just take advantage. It's so snake oil. Right. You can't just take advantage of everything. Cure everything. Solution. And you can't just be on your own to protect all of your, like every one of your interests. You can't just be on your own. No. And at the end of the day, like, I don't think I want to just have to stay home and defend my property. I would actually like a place in which I could say, well, I want the autonomy to go travel. That means that by leaving my house, I have to have a secure enough society to do that and to be able to travel or to do whatever I want to do with that. And that's like a more free life, more liberty-oriented life that requires some level of government. You can't just be on our key where we're all sort of pointing guns at each other. Are you a good guy or a bad guy? I think that's some work. Very inefficient. Yeah. So trust is really the superpower of capitalism. It really is. And trust is the motivator behind almost every exercise we have in government. If you can't trust people, then you really don't know if any contract is good. You don't know if any sort of agreement is good. You don't know if any sort of motivation in terms of a legislative element or even like, are the police good? Or are the right, you have to have a base layer of trust that the society exists upon certain principles in which we all kind of hold true. And if someone falls outside of those principles, they would be punished. There would be recourse for that. So trying to help redefine what that shared values is in that space is that. And medicine is an easy place to do it actually. Because you see the good-hearted nature of practitioners, they want to help their patients. So they have the goodwill of that. And those of us who have been like skeptical of medicine actually aren't anti-medicine or anti-corporate influence on this. Yeah, anti-corrupted medicine. Right. Or whatever. So both people have the same objective. Let's make medicine very healthy. Let's make it very transparent. Yeah. And let's make it trustworthy. And that's a really, that's probably this like weird space to sort of, I have no background in medicine. Right. My dad growing up was a Christian scientist. Like we're not even like, this isn't really, we don't have this, we don't have this perclivity to go to the doctor all the time. So we didn't, I wasn't raised that way, but I'm also very aware that that medicine has great value in our society and the compassion and care that comes from caregivers in that space is actually something they want. They don't, they're not interested in being like pill pushers. Yeah, yeah. They're not interested in being people who want to. People that really care about public health don't want that. It's just that the way the system has kind of, the system has forced them into this. Oh, we can, since you only have a fine, very fine amount of time. Yeah. And not too much time to build a relationship with your patients and stuff because of the incentives. Right. Just put a pill on it and move on. Here's, you know, you get 15 minutes as doctor to see your patient. That's not what any doctor really wants to do. They'd actually like to talk to their patient, find out what's actually going on. Is there something else? It's like, are you eating right? Are you exercising? Are you getting outside? Are you seeing the sunshine? Are you doing your hobby? Do you like all of that stuff? But you can't do that in a 15 minute event. Yeah. Basically, what's wrong? My knee hurts. Here's a bill. I was sick for a day, really, back in February. And after I was like, you know, moving on, whatever. And Lauren was, I was talking with my cheetah staff. Lauren and I was like, well, I get sick like two days a year, you know, maybe, well, sometimes, none occasionally. And she's like, how is that work? I was like, well, I look a lot of doorknobs. You know, what could I say? I'm just out there. It is. A lot. I don't. A shake a lot of hands. I shake a lot of hands. And sometimes I look my hand afterwards. I don't really eat a lot of food after I shake those hands. I'm not that uncleanly or whatever, but I do think that's giving your body some touches with stuff is important. But it's also arguably dangerous for some people, especially if they haven't developed a biome that can process that. Yeah. So that's where the public health thing comes in. Yeah. How much constriction should you have on Kurt? Maybe he's a carrier? Well, and it is, I mean, there probably is a point at which I would part ways with these folks about how to actually handle a disease or pandemic or, you know, what should we, what would be the right thing to do? But I'm very grateful that public health is actually asking some of us to be engaged in that conversation because I think they realize and recognize that they like what happened in COVID eviscerated the trust that they might have already had. They like, they just got the, I mean, this was a room full of people, honestly, there was probably 500 of the top intellectuals in the country around public health in this. And so, well, I guess I, yeah, for whatever reason to hear me talk about. So who moderated and what was the structure, what was the duration of this? So I have a question online. Is it on YouTube? Well, I don't know if it is. Yeah, it might be. The whole thing kind of generated from a friend of mine from New York City, whose name is Brenda Atacari, she's the producer of the John Stuart show. There's a number of, like, I've just met all these wonderful people through this whole kind of engagement in civic discourse that has been really fun. Her and another friend of mine who actually ended up being a doctor on the panel, who he's the, he's at Brown University and he's a teacher there in the medical space, but he's also an emergent ER doctor in, in, in Providence. Okay. So he's a great guy. Wonderful. We've become very good friends. They both said, hey, you should come to this thing because we've been on Brenda's podcast called, why should I trust you? Yeah. Okay. And I've listened to that. Yeah. You've been on it. I've been on a number of times. Yeah. Probably half a dozen times. Yeah. Some kind of thing. And it's been, it's been really good. It's great. It's always a great conversation. She gets six to eight people and kind of pretends like it's a dinner party. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, don't yell at each other. We're not looking to do crossfire. Right. Kind of CNN crap. Like, let's talk unless we may not solve anything, but at least we'll hear each other. Yeah. I think that's really good. And so we've had that, I've kind of been on that show a number of times, but the, the, this educator's group has definitely felt the pressure of not being trustworthy. And so they ultimately said, we want to recreate what you've been doing on, why should I trust you as a live panel here in, in DC so that our people could model how to have conversations with people they don't. Oh, I love it. I agree with. Yeah. Yeah. And it was awesome. Like, I was on there. So myself, Elizabeth Frost, who's another sort of Kennedy supporter from Ohio. Yeah. And she's like so involved in East Palestine, the whole train wreck kind of poisoning of their people. Sure. Her life is like wildly influenced by the opioid epidemic. Her, like, she was very impacted by that in her sort of Appalachia lifestyle. Cause she's like in the mountains of Ohio, family, family on that, but also the whole community. So she's like turned in this amazing grassroots person. Okay. So she and I are these unlearned people sitting on a panel with two PhDs on the side of us, one from Yale, who's the head of public health at Yale. And then Craig Spencer, who's this other guy, who's this wonderful doctor. He's been on the same podcast. Yeah. Same thing. So another guy, he's from Brown. So like, two Ivy League guys, people up on stage with us to whatever ruffians in between. But to be able to have that conversation to kind of like lean into, well, we don't see the world the same as each other. But that doesn't mean that we can't like come to some places in which we might be able to start a discussion. Yeah. Probably not going to have the same solutions. But we also, at least if we're heard, then at some point somebody goes, okay, well, I have to listen to somebody at least. And if I do that, then I could be more trustworthy because I could say, well, okay, I know what you are concerned about. But here's what I'm finding. And here's what I'm thinking about that is much more dialogical than just this sort of, hey, get your shot, shut up, get in line, do your thing. Like, I think it, so it's just been really cool to actually have that conversation with people who I would not normally, I don't run in these people circles. Sure. So it's really cool. This is a bit of a squirrel chase, but I was just talking to my father today. And we were talking about a few things, but drifted eventually to welfare fraud and different things in that space. Yeah. And he's like, you know, when I was a kid, we, I was had welfare, but it was, you know, from the county office. Right. And so, you know, that was, and then, you know, some counties started running out of money to do this thing. And so then they lobbied the state to go ahead and, you know, take it over instead. And so then the states doing this thing. And then, you know, the states ran out of money to do it. And so it gets concentrated in the feds and then they're, then they're to the sideers and also so far away from the problems that they can't tell when there's 25 times as too many autism clinics in theapolis or a bunch of hospice letters in Los Angeles. Well, and I think the results of that go all the way back to the fact that the money we have in our wallets is just fake news. It's fake. So it just continues to diminish. So while a county and dad's era may have had a money, have money initially, the evaporation of purchasing power of the dollar because of what the federal government was doing. Right. Means that they don't have the money any longer. The tax, the taxes that they are collecting don't keep up with the pressures upon the system because the system is already taking people into that category faster than they can then they can make up taxes. They can't pass any taxes because the people already feel burdened. And but they're purchasing powers diminishing. So then they move upstream to the state. And the state does the same thing for a while and it's survivable. But then all of a sudden it starts to fall apart. So the only place left is the federal government because they're the only ones printing the money. Right. And so you get to the end and the cycle just is like, well, I have to go to the fence because the only option. And it doesn't really work for like block grants and stuff. No, because then this can be corrupted. And so like that I talked about myself as kind of a communitarian at point in time. And it would suck that parts of, you know, Alabama, if they had a county administered, county level administered welfare program would not offer as nearly as much level of support as say New York City of five years ago. Correct. You can't physically. It doesn't have the juice. Yeah. And so then it can't support that level of folks. And you know, maybe if they want to, they can move to New York City where there's a higher level of activity and even a higher level of urbanism and a desire to help the poor people and stuff, right. But you can because you got more juice, theoretically. Theoretically for sure. And you know, that's one of the arguments. But if it was done on a county basis, then you would kind of be forced to live within your means, regardless. Whereas if you don't live within your means and you've got a federally financed thing, you can just create some more means to it everyone. Yeah. Make more means. Well, and I think it's one of the biggest harms to people all the more. Yeah. And I think it's one of the biggest arguments or like kind of points of dissension currently within whether it's Republican politics or Democratic politics. I think you see the same thing, which is like, well, it's you that inhibit yourself from success. You know, you hear this sort of conversation with that's right. Boomer trickle down of like, it's your drinking Starbucks. That's your problem kid. Right. Right. Right. That sort of dismissive stuff or like, hey, you know, you get Ben Shapiro who says, well, just move to a city and make your life. Right. Right. Well, how about if my grandparents and great-grandparents and everybody are buried here and I don't want to leave? Right. Can we make a community that actually works where I want to live? Right. And my father bought a house for like $17,000 when I was a little kid, which is like, you know, right? You can't do it. That's not even the day in North Dakota, which hasn't been a vibrant economy, respectively, is probably $200,000. Well, exactly. So it's 10x harder even from that short time ago. And even if you, you know, you get the Boomer argument that comes in and says, well, but you're also making way more money than we ever did. It's not true. The reality of what $17,000 was in relationship to what you were actually making as a wage at a job. Right. Statistically, within real estate, you're talking like 1975, it was two to one. So your house costs twice what you're at yearly salary would be a six to one now. Right. So it's not the same. Right. It's, it's not the same. And no one in politics wants to acknowledge, whether it's a few, but not very many in politics wants to acknowledge that it is the evaporation of the purchasing power of the dollar that has caused every structural issue with the economy. And everything related to that is deficit spending. Right. That's where the evaporating. Most of the evaporating purchase availability comes from my youngest son is turning 18 in May. So he was born the year that Obama was elected and took office. The year that Obama was elected, 2008, when Obama took office in 2009. So this is like 17 years ago, whatever 18 years ago, the deficit was just, just had crossed 10 trillion. So that's 18 years. Now we're at 39 with soon by the end of the year to cross over 40. For sure. So what, that's a 4x times on the money. Do we have four times the things to show for the money that we spend? And the answer is always no. There's no, there is no point in which you go, yes, what I have, what I've gotten for the money that our government has chosen to spend has been a betterment of the American people. And does that inflation that fake news money stuff also flow back into the corruption of like public health? Of course. Or insurance companies or any of it. I mean, all of it. You could pick it from, I mean, I think there's like four major categories of things. You've got a military industrial complex. You've got a media industrial complex who supports all of it. Sure. Right. But you have a financial industrial complex. And I think you have a sort of like government industrial complex that's kind of over here that sort of oversees all of it and kind of moves money back and forth within itself. And this financial system sort of allows that to happen. And then you've got this military thing that's over here. And and that's kind of all you medical complexes there. I'm sure. Yeah. I think that's in that too. I'm sure. I mean, the biggest industries in our country all have a technology tech has it. They all have this underlying engine of like self supporting. You know, I've always found it. How is this to make fun of Elon Musk? Because it's like always a genius. Yeah, except that he got like, what could you do with 10 billion dollars from your federal government that was handed to you because you pitched an idea? Right. What could you do? I mean, I bet I could do a lot of great things. I bet I'd have fucked it up. Probably. Well, I mean, just say it. Okay. But I mean, you could pick a lot of smart people you know. For sure. Well, you could say, well, what would you do with them? That is true. And like, it's almost a argument for subsidies in some ways, right? Because not it has to be in this system. How much other value creation has he done between SpaceX, you know, SpaceX has taken kilograms to space for like, oh, we 10 bucks that used to be 10,000 or something. No, what he's done with that subsidy is right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's almost justifies the subsidy for sure. Right. Right. A lot of other subsidy receivers like just build a windmill farm and then go out of business or windmill factory. But I mean, I think there's just pieces of it that are that are tough because I don't know that you can there is no such thing as a free market. It doesn't exist. Like, we have one to think that it does. Yeah. But like, the boulders farmers market is the closest thing. So let's come back to the health segment. Like, what do you think is trending? What's changing? Is there, you know, is public trust turning around some? It's kind of yes, yes, but also a lot of like healthy skepticism in it. Okay. Lots of interesting statistics. We talked about it a little bit on the panel. I mean, 45% of Americans, generally speaking in terms of polling, would say that they support some element of that they support the make America healthy again agenda. Okay. So that's almost half the country. Right. If you asked that question two election cycles ago, he would have been much less. Sure. They wouldn't have that. They wouldn't have they've been like, well, that's Michelle Obama and school lunches. Right. Well, Jenny McCarthy and she's crazy. Yeah. And she's crazy. Right. So so you have this great movement, I think, in terms of people going like, okay, something's wrong. My food is wrong. My medicine is wrong. Something's like, I don't feel as good as I should. Something's up. That's great. I'm actually really that's super positive. You also see a lot of things like in within maha, whatever that is. You see statistics where 70% of those people support vaccines. Okay. Okay. So that's like, it doesn't mean that they're all anti vaccine radicals. So it means like half the country is sort of interested in this. Like, help me get myself fixed. Yeah. Yeah. But also, I'm not going to just dismiss medicine either. Right. Right. And I think that means that there's room there for sure to have these conversations and say, well, in which vaccines, I think is a part of the question. Is it all 68 of them? Right. Right. Should it be seven of them again, like it was when my dad was getting vaccines. Right. And I think the biggest rub of the whole deal continues to come back to. It's too expensive. The whole thing is too expensive. It's the biggest issues and I can't get the care I want because it's way too much money for me to do it. Yeah. And secondarily, I think people want care that is specific to them. It seems like AI should be able to help us with this. It should in some ways. And because ultimately, it isn't super hard to understand what can make you healthier as a human. Yes. It's hard to do a lot of it. It's the discipline to do it. It's exercise. It's avoidance of whizz-cow. It's thanks to our spirit sponsors, even spirit distilling. It's, you know, doing, you know, for me, it's even a 30-minute yoga session instead of my quick 10-minute thing that I do just to stay flexible enough to not be annoyed, you know. I really am. Like, I'm sort of moving myself to focus in this space because I think it's the only place that we can, if we could sort of beta test what happens within it, we might be able to translate that to other elements of our government, might be able to, or governments, I mean, you can't avoid the influence of government on every aspect of our economy. But I think if you could figure it out here or you could figure it out in finance, you could figure it out in housing, you could figure it out in, there are going to be places in which people go, I don't want to live the way we're living. Yeah, yeah. And health is the most prescient because it's, it's right on the surface for most people. They're the ones like getting up in the morning like, man, I just don't feel good. Right. I feel like crap every day. On overweight, I don't eat right. I don't like the food we're eating. There's this thing that, right, in part of it is the food, right, even the nutritional density of even the vegetables we eat. What used to be in the 1950s, one carrot is now six. Really? Yeah. Wow. So the same nutritional density of a carrot in 1950 or whatever is like four or six carrots now. You have to eat the same. So you have to eat that much to get the same nutrition density. I realize it was that bad. Yeah, it's terrible. Oh gosh. And that's in everything across our food, right? And is that, is that different? If I, if I've got like the other day, I was down at the food club and I bought a few things, one of which was a bag of native hill carrots. Yeah. Which if you eat something local and grown, not, but everything that's in industrialized agriculture, right, is nutrient deficient. Okay. So like go to grocery store. Yeah. Even the things you think are healthy, the organic stuff, whatever, those are going to be nutrient deficient in relative terms, commercially raised with pesticides or herbicides or some organic might be better. But our, but our standard industrialized food is, is it, it's just like our money. If the carrots are all the same size and shape and they fit in the bag that good, then there's some kind of a thing that's wouldn't wouldn't you think? I mean, that was the first thing I noticed about the native hill ones is they were, they're odd, they're little shy, but they have whatever they're all the fat that we are. They've got knuckles on them or whatever. Yeah. And then the days to the twice is good. Of course, they're sweeter. They have more, they have a lot more richness to it, eating one of those and you feel full. Right. Whereas you have like one carrot now and you're like, I don't know, it kind of tastes like paper, mostly. So is that, is that legit? Like the stuff I grew on my garden, like my tomatoes that I bring out of my garden or they're better. Yeah, they're going to be better for you because you're in control of what you're doing. And I still think like those are the things that I think most people can agree on. How do you know, I get it? It's not, it's not convenient. I know my eggs have twice as much nutrients as the eggs I get from the grocery store, unless I get the nine dollar eggs from the grocery store, then they're almost as good as my home ones. But even that, you don't, you know what your chickens are eating. Right. You know what you're, if you, if you choose to, what do you spray, miracle grow or whatever on your, on your garden, you know, and most people can grow a garden, most people can grow enough food in their yard to like do pretty well. Yeah. Yeah. At least supplement, but it takes time. It takes energy. Yeah. Well, it takes a lot of water too. It does. And this sort of evisceration of our dollar means that you don't have the time to do the things you want to do at your house because you're busy putting your head down in the trench, shoveling money into your bank account. The tomorrow is less is worth less. So there, there's like a strategic element to the money that has to get fixed. If you want to fix any of this, you have to go all the way back to the beginning of it and say we're starting over with the money. Right. We're starting over with the money. So Bitcoin then. I don't know. Bitcoin is it. I still think of currencies. Is it the root bull? I don't, I don't know. I don't know that there's a real great currency solution. The traditional historic one has been gold or silver. Right. Gold is at five thousand bucks an ounce, you know, or was is like right in that world. Well, you couldn't actually transact it, but if you could have it be gold based, a gold based digital currency is what feels. That seems the most actually possible. The most possible. We have issuers that are private organizations, even the, I guess, have to get audited and shit, though, because you didn't take. But I prefer an audit over a, of a private organization over the Federal Reserve who won't be audited ever. I would take that choice. I think I think look nothing secure. You don't want the Federal Reserve to issue a digital currency. No, it's a goal. There are no gold. No, I think that's really the piece of like there is this parting of ways it's coming. And I don't know that there's any way around it. Some things are going to have to be private, including money. Yeah. If we're ever going to get our country to be something that functions on a real basis. Yeah. As long as the government has some say in what is happening at the Federal Reserve. I can manipulate interest rates. I can do whatever it is. Most people don't even realize this too. That 90% of the money is actually created at the bank level. Right. You know, they just create a new loan. They just create a new money. There's no, there's like, there's no thing in your vault. It's like, oh, well, John Doe brought in five hundred thousand dollars of cash. So now I can lend that out to you to build your house. That's all fake because it's not a thing. Nobody realizes like you just create money at the ledger level at the bank. Well, and it does kind of work a little bit like that. But it's like John Doe brought in 50,000 dollars to deposit in the bank. Because now the bank can loan out 200,000. No, 500,000 or more. Yeah, more or more like 700,000 or a million maybe. But nobody knows where that money is coming from. Right. And so then that guy goes out and spends it. And he spends it amongst all those people. They take it to the bank. They deposit it in the bank and make more money off of that money. It's a pretty bad system. It's the one that we because we don't understand it. If anybody told you that's how they were going to operate their business, you'd tell them you're going like you're criminal. But unfortunately, you know, because the government has its little stamp on it and we get to see George Washington on dollar bills or whatever that it's okay. So I want to go back to public health for a moment and really keep our focus somewhat on that. But the it seems like a little bit the incentives aren't going to always drive the outcomes. And so like if a hospital can make a quarter million dollars on a cancer treatment, why would they want to get rid of cancer? For sure. Kind of, right. And stuff. And so like, is there any fresh thinking around it's almost philosophical about how can you find organizations at scale that can actually be about creating healthy people instead of sick people to treat? I think it's why I'm most interested in the public health people. Because I think for a number of reasons, I think the public health people actually do have this sort of they're not making a bunch of money. They're probably, you know, like they live they work and they work in this sort of low level world of medicine in terms of pay. But they have these altruistic hearts that are like, no, I actually really want to see the best for my patient. So somewhere in that marriage is the worthwhile conversation because I think the person who's like, no, I'll just I want to make as much money as I can possibly make. I'm going to work for a hospital system or I'm going to do boob jobs or whatever it is, you know, whatever is the most money kind of thing. I think those folks are always going to have the perverse incentives. Yeah, it's impossible to avoid. Whereas public health, I think, is like there are enough good like the social workers. Yeah, there's enough people in that world that are like, no, I'm here for the like I'm here for the cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm and I think that's good. I'm reminded of a conversation I had probably maybe it was June or so of 2021, you know, because the vaccines kind of came out to the general public, maybe about what like, yeah, March or something. November of 2020 was they were sort of approved to the old people and so for the old people. So you're like, yeah, probably the spring of that year. Kind of by March. The normal, you know, middle-aged people could have it. And by May, I had written my most famous blog about why I was going to go ahead and pass based on my risk analysis and got a lot of encouraging letters and stuff. But then and well, both I actually did get some pleasure. I got a lot more flattened. But the I talked with a gal that was like a public health surveyor per se. Yeah. And she was a graduate student at CSU and just kind of asking people, you know, if they were backed up, if they weren't what why, if they were, you know, what and just doing a big big old survey. And so I took the survey and we had a lovely conversation and I kind of explained to her kind of my reasoning, which has been pretty and she we had a really excellent conversation actually. She's like, I can't really say anything for sure that you're not right. For sure. So she was intellectually honest as well at the time there wasn't enough evidence to know I was right or wrong in that moment. And I actually think that's true. Like I think the last. And I didn't know either. Right. I think all of us kind of said we're not doing this as a multitude of reasons. But it was mostly for me. Yeah. I mean, I was scared. I didn't want to fear. I also being compelled to do something as the worst way to possibly give me to do it. I might fall in that. But I do think that was what has was so surprising. I wrote a piece about it. It's gotten a lot of traction. It's been like tons of people have asked if they could publish, republish it and pick it up. And it was really, it was like why maha needs public health. And and I think they do. I actually think they do. I think our country needs way more of that than we ever want to admit. Nobody really wants to watch you know, Paul Begalla and Pat Buchanan and Terry, each other's votes out on crossfire. Right. Well, and the bad ass policy that doesn't mean anything. Like there's an argument we made that the WHO is prudent to have been withdrawn from anyway. Sure. But but resources at scale is actually very good for public health for understanding of your data and different things. If if if use appropriate, if we put our efforts at the things that actually could make the outcomes less collusional, yeah, and less driven, you know, one of the arguments we had in the panel, which I thought was a really interesting one is actually between the two doctors. Okay. And one doctor was like, look, if you want people to trust you, like figure out how to do your science so that it isn't privately funded or is privately corruptible. And the other doctor was like, well, yeah, but there's no money in government. So how do we do that? And I think the argument is somewhere in there is there's an argument to split that baby to some degree to be able to say like, look, if you're going to do privately funded stuff, then you have to have a third party analyze that data. And that might be where government could be a more efficient out, you know, arbiter of the analysis. Okay, well, we don't have the money to do the study. Bayer, you do. You've got billions of dollars. So do your study or whatever. But we have to make an analysis of your study before it happens. And here's all the places, almost like financial security. Here's all the places where you can lie, cheat, steal, mess with the accounts receivable. Yes. And the statistics. Yes. But you could also do that. Presumably, presumably you could do it with medicine. Yeah, with smarter people than me. And I think you could say, okay, if that's all the case, and this is going to happen, there can't be any corporate donations to the government and their politicians to influence that circle, which is where we are. And that is the rub. That's lobbyists. That's lobbyists. And it's also you've got citizens united, which I, you know, this lobbyist is one thing different than donations. You have this. And I have come around on citizens united in a way that I think is actually more honest. You know, it's first like, while your your side says citizens united is the right decision, which is like, okay, money is speech. I agree with that premise. I disagree with the fact that there's only 500 people to buy. Right. To make this totally. And you don't even really need 500 people. You need a majority of those 500 people to make your thing happen. And that, and you saw it. I think I saw at first hand over and over again, whether it was like those, those hearings for confirmation or different things that were going on throughout this deal. You would just see people that should be, okay, look, like, okay, just just pragmatically say Donald Trump on the election, your public and Senator from Louisiana. Donald Trump is appointed RFK to be the guy for health and human services. Why the hell are you involved in this? Like, you should be saying, yes, he's the guy of your president that wanted to get this done. Right. But you saw over and over again, this like heavy, posturing, posturing of like, well, but are you anti vaccine? Are you, you know, this is like real, heavy hand and stuff because they had to ultimately. And Kennedy had to make try to satisfy their voters and stuff, too. That's still a 10 think vaccines. Right. Or sat is via the person that made their campaign work donations. Donation work. And so they're like, yeah, to pretend that voters are actually paying much attention to these conversations. Is that real? And so, you know, you saw that and then you had to see you saw RFK make a huge basically concession set of deals with Cassidy from Louisiana, who was a doctor, you know, who basically was like, no, I'm going to make sure that you always have vaccines and you know, whatever, it's like, you can't do any changes without my approval. And it's just kind of weird circle of stuff. But somewhere in there is this corporate influence. It's like, okay, well, Cassidy gets X number dollars from Pfizer. It gets X number dollars from Merck. He gets all these monies upstream castrated from the corruption. It's still working. So, so that system is really where I think, but I think public health can actually, if they were willing to be, and I think they are, if they are willing to be publicly honest about all of that, and say like, no, we actually don't want that. We actually don't want all that influence coming into our system that we could fix this. Yeah. And so there's this like really great little glimmer of hope. That's not going to happen in the finance bro world, right? Like they're not going to sit down at the table and be like, well, yeah, you're right. We're pretty corrupt. Like they're not going to do any of that. They're going to sit there and go like, okay, I'm going to make as much money as I can. Right. That's going to happen to tech bro world. It's going to medicine somehow has this like little weird old like this Hippocratic oath that puts over the top of it like do no harm. We can do something for people. Well, and that feels like there's a space there in a window to have that discussion. This is, I want to do one more question in this health space. And that is kind of around that Hippocratic oath that says you always have to try to help somebody you can, basically, which is good. I like that. And it's also like we have so many technologies and so many techniques. And so if every person that you could maybe help stay alive for a little while, longer gets treatment, the whole health care system remains perpetually broke because it's trying to help everybody not die. Even though people need to die, you know, Canadian euthanasia. Well, we don't need that either. But there is somewhere there's a there's a kind of a line where we're in, you know, and certainly if you've got like all the wealth in the world and you're right in your own bills, that's one thing. I think there's a public shared. I think that's where most Americans are heartbroken actually is that they go there's 40 trillion dollars of debt and I'm sicker than I've ever been. I'm dying sooner than my parents. I've got all these things that are going, it just feels like how can you be this the wealthiest nation in the world and be and have such blatant disregard for your people. And I think that's really where the health thing is most fascinating to me because they're the last people in this line of defense to say like, no, actually we should do the right thing. We should do the right thing. Does it mean that we should all live to be 150 years old? You know, I don't know, probably not. But I also think we should give people the best chance at the longest quality of life that we can't. I sat with a man today it was right in a real estate contract with him. His wife just passed away. He's 88 years old. You know, he's a wonderful option. He's like one of the most meaningful things I've done in the last 10 years. He's just sitting with this man who's just today. Yes, today. Who's married 68 years? Oh, well. And I told my wife today, I was going to go over and do this and we both got teary. We've been together 25 years. And I thought, I just don't know what I'm going to do if you're not here, you know. And there's something in that human ethos that I think is where medicine actually starts from. Just like, I want to help people. I want them to live as long as they possibly can have one more memory to have one more kiss goodbye, one more, just a longer time together to enjoy the fruits of their labor and their life. Medicine can help you do that. And if we're willing to have those discussions about what we want as a country, we shouldn't also bankrupt them for that last hour together. We shouldn't do that. Right. Yeah, for sure. And so I think there's something in this. So are you coming around to a single payer kind of element? But then you still have to, somebody's going to be the insider. I don't know what my solution is. And I trust Jill is my insider, but I don't just, I don't know. I think the co-op experience for us, whoops, the co-op experience for us has been the most fascinating experiment. And that's been because we've actually had to be invested in the lives of the people that we've helped send the money to. Sure. Something there. I don't know how to do that on a national level, but back to your point initially, of like, can the local world solve those problems? I don't know. Could you have a county co-op for your medicine where you said, like, okay, you paid in this much money and that money, but you're paying directly. I don't know. I don't know how that works. Because you got all this tax system stuff. There's a lot to unwind. I don't know that I have all the solutions, but I think there's something to the idea that medicines should still be person to person. There should be some element that like my health and what I pay for that health should be directly related to what the care I get. And that's not where we are. Sure. If I were in the medical insurance system, my health is predicated upon what my health insurance company says I'm worth. Right. Which is the evaluation of the human on its basic level. Yeah. And I don't think that's right. Because then we do become Canada. We do become, well, I'm only an expense to the system. Right. I don't want that. Yeah. I don't want to be an expense to the system. I want to be I want to be around for as long as possible. And if we are the wealthiest nation in the world, should we not be able to solve this system? Should we not be able to solve this? Instead of blowing up girl schools in Iran, I, you know, well, that too. Did I say that out loud? Very non politically correct. We should blow up as many girl schools in Iran as we want to, Mr. until the problem is solved. Let's take a little break. Sounds good. We'll come back. Seems like you need to administer. Hi. This is Clint Jasperson, managing partner at purpose driven wealth. We believe financial clarity leads to a life of contentment and purpose. Our mission is to guide clients through the complexities of wealth management, retirement planning, and legacy using a values driven, stewardship-based approach focused on provision, contentment, and enjoyment. With more than a century of expertise through thriving, we offer tailored strategies to help individuals and families achieve their goals and embrace generosity. Whether you're navigating a life or business transition or planning for the future, we're here to partner with you every step of the way. To learn more about purpose driven wealth, call 970-330-741. There's a drink in St. Croix once upon a time I went down to Scott Nielsen and his wife Anna. It was called Lime in the Coconut. It seems kind of similar. Well, Coco Loco. It had Coco Lopez in it, rum, lime, and a vanilla rum. Okay. Yeah. This is really similar. Yeah. Got the same sort of stuff going on. The lime salt from Escher's Market. It doesn't trim across. It would be better with a half-align screen. It doesn't quite translate, but it's, you know, hey, it's there. This is a seed and spirit the stilling house rum. Yes. Is it aged? Or is it just? Oh, it is. Okay. It's a darker rum. Yeah. Yeah. It's that on the left there. Oh, nice. So they're doing some brands like the Whizcal, like the bourbon out there and stuff. Yeah. And then stuff like that rum will only be available at the distillery. Nice. In the new funkware. I have to go. They're moving into that tap. The front of the, yeah, they've been in the back forever. They've been in the back forever. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that was what Joel was here last or recently for was to talk about the new plans. I don't have to go over and visit that. But yeah, it's a very nice rum. Actually, it's really good. Yeah. Yeah, you can taste the rum on the backside even of the coconut water, which is heavy in the Esch's lime salt, which is subtle subtle. I feel like we should talk about war. Okay. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Aside from maintaining the control of oil, I mean, is that that kind of the like if if we get to be to a real where solar is actually providing a lot of the juice, you know, even the solar data centers that I think aren't going to be that far away. We've seen a bunch of freaking solar panels up in space and put our data centers up there. So we don't have to cool them so much and stuff, right? Um, I don't know if this thing is the best for the universe. I don't know if this is as much about oil, the weird one. I go, I'm back in this war. This war or just what Israel wants us to do more. Well, you're welcome to have that conversation. You don't want those guys wondering about you. You don't have that kind of research. I'll do my best Tucker Carlson impression in impersonation and destroying my life by having that discussion. No, I think I'm not as convinced that this is about oil. I think it really goes about stopping them from having proper nukes. This is about the end of the American empire. This is this is this war or three. Does it it take a war to end the American empire? No, we just fizzle out. We just no, we don't have the money. We just get exhausted. We don't have another. We don't have the money. The whole system doesn't this is the quagmire that finishes us. Yeah, I don't think the system has enough money in it left between who's borrows from who like the whole system isn't like. So who do we owe the money to? Yeah, we could probably have someone that we can shine up for another five trillion. I think this advances five trillion. I don't know they're going to totally defend Taiwan properly. But even if they didn't, this is the thing. I don't even know if China even said, okay, we're with you. Here's five trillion dollars. Where'd they get their five trillion? I don't know. Nobody knows. It's just a bunch of stuff that's going to move around. So I just think this is the last exertion of force to be able to say like, we still control the system. And I don't think anybody's asked, I don't think anybody's really looking at it from that perspective. I think they're looking at is like, what are the resources and who's is real? And I think this is like a much bigger deal. I think this is like, look, the money's collapsing all across the globe because everybody's sort of waking up to the fact that their money doesn't buy them what they think it should. I think they're looking at immigration all across the globe and going like, I don't understand. I don't even recognize my country anymore. I think they're looking at like all of it. Nothing is really functional. Medicine, tech, it doesn't, you need an app to do everything like everybody's surveilled. Everybody's under. So I think there's enough pressure amongst the body politic across the globe. I don't think this is just the United States. I think it's across the globe that are going, I don't really want to live like this. I don't actually want to do this anymore. That undercurrent of rebellion has to be sort of like demonstrated that the old system still works. So I think this is like more about that. We're telling you that it works. Watch us bomb the hell out of everybody. Right. The trouble is, I think it's a very normal thing. I think most people in the United States are like, okay, gas is expensive. That's so low are my potatoes. Everything's crazy. I don't like it. I have no power to change it. So it's just sort of subjected to this machine that runs in front of me and I don't really know what to do about it. If I infim the guy that was like, I don't think we can do it in other 10 years. Even if Roy and I ran spending a half trillion dollars. I don't think, I mean, look, Minnesota was this crazy exposure of all this fraud stuff and all these people. I'm never going to pay my taxes again. They all paid their taxes. I never heard one story about anybody. If they did, you know, if they didn't, they'll go to jail. There won't be enough critical mass for people to, like, Americans don't have that kind of backbone. Right. You know, the blustery is during COVID nation. Yeah, they'll bluster a bunch during Twitter or whatever. They'll yell at everybody. I'm not paying my taxes. They'll pay their taxes. They'll disappear. They'll post on Twitter that they, you know, are really rebellious. But I think the, I think this whole thing is this kind of like look, the facade is failing. We have to do something to demonstrate that we can keep the facade up. Yeah. The dollar is dependent upon the dependent upon this region of the world. It depends on it. The interesting thing is that, you know, there's not a strong replacement for the dollar unless it really came from America too. Because here, yeah, it's where we have the most productive people and stuff. You know, and so could you have, like, a locally sourced currency or something, you know, backed by gold, backed by silver, backed by Bitcoin, backed by... I definitely think that the solution to this whole globalization moment that was a really failed experiment that came out of World War II is decentralization. I think it just still comes down to, can, can Fort Collins, for instance, operate autonomously how it wants to operate. Right. And if it has a surplus of corn, then it can sell it. Yeah. And if it wants to buy some more corn, if it wants to operate as a communist institution, which it loves to do, leading toward that, yeah, whatever. Then like, let it do it. I don't, you know, let's see. Can it survive? Can it do, can it do that? And, and I think the, the smaller we can localize those discussions, the more we will actually get into beta experiments about what might work. Alternative currency forums. Could you do that? Could you do it? Could you, could you, could you say, okay, well, within the boundaries of Fort Collins, within the city limits, any money you make goes to the city and we distribute it? And if the people of that world want that to happen, then they should have the autonomy to do so. Oh. And if they don't, like, so I have to move if I don't want it then? Well, I think, I think it would be a prudent decision. Well, you're kind of there anyway. Right. You're sort of living within this strange construct that like we still live in this free market world. But Fort Collins doesn't operate like that. Right. We're leaving. Well, and without the, you're leaving. Our business that's been around that made the city of Fort Collins what it is is gone. Yeah. We're not like going to be here. We're not going to do any development work. There's nothing to do here. You can't get it done. So I got excluded. Right. But under the pretense of, you know, some kind of altruism or whatever, right? I mean, my family business that's been here since the 1950s that made everything that is wonderful in this town, every neighborhood that everybody wants to live in. Yeah. There are a lot of them. Right. We don't exist. When we can't exist here, the business, like we got squeezed out. So, but I got squeezed out under the pretense of, I'm just an evil greedy robber bearer and developer. Right. And really got squeezed out instead by Wall Street money funding real estate development and home building. Yeah. Because the only because the regulations that happened to the city of Fort Collins excluded local developers because they didn't have the money or the pockets to do the thing that the city needs to do. Most people don't understand this. Like if I want to build a development in the city of Fort Collins, I don't know, not only do I have to pay for the development. There's millions of dogs. Yeah. Yeah. I also have to escrow. This is the curbs and the gutters and all the reals, all the reals. I also have to escrow at the city the same amount of money times 1.5. So if my development cost me 10 million, I also have to come up with 15 million to put in reserves at the city in case I fail as a developer. Oh, so they can finish. So they can finish it. Right. And I still chase those. I'm still chasing down escrosse. It was until last year chasing down escrosse from the city of Fort Collins from the May Avenue estate street developed in 2010. Oh, damn. So like my world is, you know, and everybody will say, oh, you make too much money anyway, which is like, okay, well, that's the own conversation about weird who gets to do what and whatever. But but at some level, if this town wants to do that, it will exclude the people who don't want to be here to do their experiment. Right. Does that mean that you should move in that kind of scenario in which I let local autonomy be its biggest deal? The answer is yes. Well, that's what I seem. That seems like the Republic has failed. But I guess that's what we're talking about. Yeah. I just I don't think it. I don't think it's the circumstance that we're exploring. We are now saying the there's no way to sustain the Republic and have a different monetary system potentially that we can just kind of transition to or something. No, I don't think there's a soft way out of this. Yeah. This, which is what the war in Iran is about is this last demonstration of like no, we are the empire. Yeah. This is why I go all the way back to Suez. At some point, Eisenhower says bullshit. All right. Look, he just is saying, which I mean, the Europeans their first response was you did what? So now we're here fighting over the straight of four moves. Right. One of the same circumstances in which the empire is exerting its last will to say that we are the still the empire. And it's failing. Do you think there's a chance that Iran is made Western friendly through this? This is the craziest like we don't understand. We don't understand anything about ancient civilizations. We don't know Homer. We don't know Gilgamesh. We don't read any of that stuff anymore. So we're not for going to understand Persian people and what they're what their spirit of like longevity is. So we'll go in there and blow a bunch of stuff up and kill a bunch of people. But the Persians are going to say like no, but this is Persia. This is these are my people that goes all the way back to what were the Persians before they became Muslims? I don't know that there was necessarily a religion. There might have been a sectarian. You know, every people group for the most part from the beginning starts with some kind of religious experience. Yeah. There's a god. They were from over by Mongolia or something like that. Was there a result of people? Yeah. So I don't necessarily know their initial religion other than it was probably some sort of version of multiple gods, multiple, you know, god of brain, god of whatever. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of conversation about like, okay, so what was promised to Abraham? What was promised in this? That's why Israel is there, right? Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, you know, what is the promised land? What are the trial of tribes? If you really analyze Israel as a nation state, you are talking about a period of about 86 years as a unified kingdom from basically King Saul, King David and King Solomon. Those are the three kings. It's 80, depending on how you interpret it, it might be 85 to 110 years long as a unified existence, although the seasons of the judges and stuff was some of the years, right? But they're not unified, right? It's a multitude of, you know, sort of there's a people group. There's these diaspora sort of in that region of people. It's growing. There's lots of, you know, Hebrew people. And then they fucked it up. But Solomon basically, yeah. So then you have the Babylonian exile. You have. So really from the end of the really the end of Solomon's reign, now the kingdom splits. Yeah. So you've got Judea and then the other 12 and the other 11, hundreds of years of. Yeah. So another 500 plus years. Yeah. Of the split kingdom. And then you get to the Babylonian exile in 586. Babylon comes in and destroys the temple, the first temple, they so Babylon rules that, which moves right into the Roman Empire, which moves right into sort of Christendom, Christendom and then into the Muslim experience of after six hours. So although Christendom expanded a lot, like Christendom started where the Muslims became strong. For sure. In a lot of respects, we moved out of there and then over to Europe, the new world of Europe first, but then eventually to the new world, new world, and also to Africa, like some of the strongest growth for Christianity for a while was in Africa, Nigerians, and for sure Africans and stuff, of course. And then you have sort of Muslim, you know, sort of expansion of the 600s and on. And that's where you get the crusades. You have all of this stuff that sort of South Korea gets so Christian. I don't you know, I think there seems like it could have never made that happen if you tried after the Korean War. Yeah, I don't know. I actually don't know that answer. I don't know. Although now they're like not having any babies and stuff, so they're fake Christian, I guess, kind of, right? Like they're actually, religion has converted to capitalism and consumerism kind of and a good top talk on that, which was that the more competitive a society is in the capitalistic sort of money. I hate that word that it's like we're going to be capitalists because nothing on the planet is capitalist. It doesn't exist. You just have like accepted the farmers market. That's everything else is like collusional and whatever. But let's just say what you have in South Korea is a pretty dominated deal by several corporate interests, Samsung, you know, these sort of Korean entities. You get a very high competitive level to be at the top of those places. Well, children are an impediment to the to your ability to compete. So that's like cultural competition to become and the country is so urbanized that there really isn't like being a good farmer in Korea. Correct. And you see the same thing in Japan. These sort of limited resources, areas, Japan, Korea. These are these are things that are like you have a limited amount of land, a limited amount of deal. At some point North Korea ultimately overwhelmed South Korea simply by their demographics. Right. Because they're people who are willing to have babies. Well, and that's like in South Koreans don't breed with anybody else but other Koreans. And so I think there's a good like mutual wind we had there where you can bring North Koreans in for both labor source to do stuff, actual boy stuff. Sorry, South Korea. But I think it speaks to the whole point of the whole system, which is that it's we're at the end of an era. We are really at the end of what was the post World War II era in which there was an order and a rules based system. That is we and I'm going to blame the United States for this because we just really didn't do this well. We did not take the keys to the kingdom and do the betterment by it. We chose on and I don't blame the boomers. I blame somewhat the boomers and Gen X and like whoever's been in leadership. Right. Even my generation are taking the bait basically. We took the bait power of the currency powered too much. Fiat was it empowered too many things. No. Cheap things. And that those those cheap things. So yes, maybe somebody had bigger bank accounts but it came at the expense of something. Right. It came at the expense of the people. When we were talking about that localness before I was thinking you know rather than play this game that we've been talking about here this inflationary game. Yeah. Like it's starting to come to except for the fact that you need some kind of an alternative money at least to some extent but not necessarily. Like I've watched some of these videos on YouTube about these people home setting properties in Alaska and stuff. And they catch fish, they dry vegetables, they can it and things like that. And they just live some of them just on their own. Some of them have an Airbnb right. So you can have some access to fake currency but at least you've got some fake currency. Yep. And just kind of live on this no mortgage what I can create you know and have a literally a discretionary spending of $3,000 a year or something you know for buying more sugar and thread and whatever. Yeah. I do think it's interesting. There's a couple of things I've been following in real estate. One's called the Axe real estate stuff and it's more of a multi-generational farm-stepping kind of thing where they have like they call them ran chises. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is a really fascinating movement. We'll put it in a corporate structure in a pass-downable kind of. Yeah and so your inheritance is really about your ability to you know thrive off of this system that was really was Jefferson's idea which is that every American would have sort of freehold land in which they could operate and make decisions based upon the economics that happened at their feet. Right. And I just don't know we just are so far away from that. Yeah. We just really are and I think that's part of what has really disrupted everything. Oh we got lazy too. Yeah for sure. Like honestly. It's easy. It's easy to make cheap money. Right. So much easier than to hold my vegetable garden and stuff. Yeah so it's like keep a 300 square foot vegetable garden and sometimes it's a lot of work to keep that thing clean and tidy. It still doesn't produce 20% of my food. Evil attacks us at our place in which we are most vulnerable which is the places in which we we feel some control so like I want an easy life. So evil knows that and it attacks me at that place in my life where my easiness the tendency towards laziness and easiness is where evil attacks most. And I think that's true across the board so you know we we don't want it's easier to try to go out and say well let me do it let me build a whole stupid system of derivatives and CDOs and CD you know like fake CDOs and all the different things are in Wall Street that are just like you know synthetic collateralized debt obligations. Yes synthetic CDOs and that was right right we make all that up because it's a lot easier to talk in fancy language than it is to raise a tomato. And so if we make that all up then the tomato takes back seat when we should really be like no no no the work that comes from making a tomato is actually better for us as humans. It's actually the discipline of saying I want to make a tomato in a garden or some music on my piano. Right all of that is way more important to the human experience to the tactile human experience than some kind of whatever nonsense upstream which I might get really rich because I made a you know I made a good bet. Yep and I can buy a nice house and stuff that I got really I love the big shorts like one of my favorite movies of all time and my favorite character in that is the guy from Boulder who's like that Brad Pitt pays plays him and he's like you know he's way into seeds as his currency like organic seeds right right because he's sell you know like the whole world such a he's seen the underbelly right and he's just like okay I'll help you do this but okay you're rich so what right which is a great question you know like okay you're rich so what do you do look right right who cares if that gets interrupted yeah I'm gonna do about it but and and I think we have so many of those things that are at the where the edge of this empire that is just so you know well and maybe our resources aren't as robust here as I think because there's probably some period of anarchy and not rules based order in the clubs of this you you'll have to have disruption no I don't know if it goes all the way to anarchy but I think you'll have disruption I think you have a lot of stuff the the truth of the the continent is it's super rich right America we've got great farmland yeah it's resources like water beyond belief we've been forbidden from like digging out the minerals yeah but we have a regulation but we've got a ton of them still there we have wide a wide and if you take north America in general Canada are 50 per state it's okay we'll go to that next Mexico if you took all of that as is sort of a wide vast plain in which you could you could actually neighborly discuss trade yeah not enough to crap where you ruined everybody's life right but like okay I also not do what I say or I'm gonna tear if you 25 percent correct I mean if you if you took it and you look at it across the board you said this is the the richest continent on the planet right we can do this we don't actually need to do the things we've been doing we don't need to be off in foreign adventures deciding how we're going to ruin the lives of people so that they can immigrate to Europe to destroy Christian Europe we're not we don't need to do that we could do this on a level that we actually have a thriving wonderful autonomous left alone people yeah we could do you think there's a chance that AI could actually help yeah in the implementation of yeah and I hate I hate I hate AI right I hate everything but it's like a somehow potentially less corruptible than the human heart and the desire for more power more it certainly could be and I think if AI learned the only thing that I would ask AI you know like the problem with AI right now is who's inputting right so the inputs the problems create prompts and the and the developers and the things that make it you do but I think you could say if if there was if there was some sort of ethics law around AI that said that that you had to that AI had to learn from the inputs to AI are not there's a bias associated with it could you could you create it in which it it learned from its mistakes that they could acknowledge mistakes AI I don't know if it if it actually acknowledges its own yeah could it do that and if it could then it could recognize that there are probably pathways forward that are solved like there are solutions it's only a complex problem it's only a complex problem for a number of things you'll always have human intervention that'll make it messy but I think there are things within government like okay should we be spending this much money right is there really that many hospice patients in L.A. County probably not could we make that analytical thing and say what okay these are the high risk clients here yeah these are some there are real things yeah purpose driven wealth your friend Clint Jasper's sponsor of the podcast and so we have a new segment which is the purpose driven questions segment I love it so thank you to purpose driven wealth for supporting the local experience hi Clint um I'm gonna go slightly off-crypt script of one of these questions and talk about internal compass and ethical decision making and you know I think you know you had a journey of discovery in Christian faith over the years I would say is probably accurate I think our last podcast we talked about orthodox Christianity a little bit and explored that and I guess as I as I explore the ends of eras you know in the Muslim influence and the potential further you know is yeah is that is our influence withholding Muslim influence from spreading around the world farther is that a potential consequence of our losing our reserve currency that seems even more scary than us having it but what's your perspective on faith and what is the right thing like you mentioned just now can the AI learn from its mistakes well what mistakes by what measure and what is the right thing yeah that's a good question I've been more interested in the American garage than I'm interested in in most things these days okay and the and in the reason being it's all focused on our space or what do you mean well I mean can can the American garage replace the American farm can the can the dad who has his own creativity do something out of his garage that provides enough for his family to live in which they don't need to be dependent upon the system going to work getting into cubicle yeah do you know I'm working with one guy right now and I I've kind of put this enterprise thing together I don't I don't know that it's it isn't going to make me any money I don't care it's not a thing but I basically told this guy that he's a very talented young man what like maybe one of my favorite people I've had the chance to interact with you love to talk about oh yeah yeah yeah no no he's he's great he's his name's Jordan Curry and he's building these incredible guitars okay like the most beautiful guitar I've ever touched in my life okay like you've probably had a few nice ones and I've seen more nice seen a lot of nice ones I played a nice lot of nice ones I've never touched a better guitar okay and Jordan we go to church together and Jordan is the he's played with me in bands so he's a fabulous guitar player like one of the best guitar players I've ever played with okay and it's a really nice guy and you know he started he said to me last fall he said I'm starting to build guitars and I said well you know if you ever need any help with that like just let me know and his normal American skepticism came up like well okay what are you gonna extract from me what kind of help yeah what do you mean so the next Sunday we were sitting around having coffee and he said what do you mean by that and I said well what do you need you said why I actually just need a little runway like I need to be able to do some of these things I've got really good stuff and I know I can build a really great guitar and I know I can do a lot of great stuff I just need a little runway and I said well okay but what's the number you know so we kind of talked about that a little bit and I said well okay you're gonna have it and he said what do you mean what do I need what do you want for that nothing I just want you to do it for somebody else when you're successful that's what you should like that's what I want from you and he like kind of stood there flabbergasted like what do you mean you don't want anything for this I don't actually don't want you to don't want anything for this I don't want to make money off of you I just want you to succeed so that you can be home with your children in your garage working with your like and so when you need to go inside and help your wife yeah with your home school or two little kids yeah you can go inside and be with them and that to me is much more valuable than whatever money I would ever make out of that so you know that's like that's a pretty profound upside down kind of way to live well I hear it is a lot of the you know love your neighbor as you're so yeah and and that's not it we're not talking about like seven dollars yeah he needed real money and to me that was sort of a thing that was like no I can actually do this I can help you I've been given a lot in my life so you should be given a lot in your life yeah because because you're talented and you're really good at what you do and how do you build this talent it's amazing so this like this story is like so it's so much it's okay with you share oh yeah he's this means so much to me because Jordan works for an aerospace company building stuff that's ultimately going to be doing bombing alright not great things yeah I mean some of it because I don't want to I don't want to disparage that but I know what that means right like I know when you work for a company that's doing aerospace you're not just like putting satellites in the air you're doing something else if you can if you can help transition a mom maker to a guitar maker you're excited my whole life is better right because I took somebody that might be in a space that I'm not like you know fundamentally and philosophically I'm totally opposed to and if I can if I can make that transition from that guy to doing that to being his house making this making a beautiful instrument that's going to change the like change how people hear music and and make the world a better place because he's making like whoever places guitars is making more beautiful music and it's making it more beautiful and now he's home and his kids are home and they see like his kids see their dad yeah and his wife gets to like come out and like talk to him in the shop like how is that isn't that like the better use of whatever money whatever that number is it's irrelevant because the world got better which is what I want for all of us in capitalism to do just like okay I don't need to build my fucking portfolio anymore I need to do something that makes our world better and and I know that's Clint's aspiration for sure right yeah yeah how do I make my world inspiring generosity how do I do this how do I make it into something that like works for the next guy in line way below me yeah yeah kind of want to leave it I don't want to do the boomer thing and just burn the field behind me and be like it's your stupid Starbucks it's costing you all the money it's so that's why you're not rich it's because you got to caramel macchiados like yeah I want to be able to be like no no actually Jordan I hope you just thrive and that your whole life is different from the moment I interacted with you I just want I just want your life to be better and I don't really care what happens to me I don't even like you don't need to make a trade that's not the gospel listen like this no yeah this is like I'd say free gift like at some point I don't want you to have to make something for me I don't want you to have to give me a guitar I don't want anything from this I just want you to thrive in your life so that your kids know their dad isn't that like the gospel go well yes and it's a little bit you know not to put my own thoughts and share too much but the the ask of your needs and share of your abundance kind of thing that's been part of local thing tank yes and the the ask of our facilitators to kind of share and the members to share into that thing and so the notion of like it yeah you know it does require relationship right because otherwise there's going to be manipulation corruption as well if if Warren Buffett says okay sign here for your application for me to gift you some of my resources resources why does Jordan need me to sign on to his talent right why can't I just be saying like hey Jordan you are so talented you've learned all these things you can't earn it you can't earn this no I can't you're not trading really where the gospel really fits back in any sense like I just have this ability because of what's given been given to me without me ever asking isn't that the responsibility of the wealthy in our community to do that yeah it should be not through not through the government though no and it shouldn't be because I get attacked I shouldn't be able to I shouldn't have to say like oh well hey is there any way I could wander this money through some other guy to be able to give to this guy so that he can do this deal it's an enterprise zone tax credit thing why you could get way more enterprises on tax credits if you yeah and I'm sure some financial guy would tell me I'm a stupid plan put it up north of length lane then you could yeah and I'm sure some guy will tell me I'm a fool for having done it and I am yeah but I love Jordan and I think his guitars the most beautiful things I've ever seen in terms of that deal so shouldn't he be successful if you can look back in five or twenty five years or even never it was awesome yeah what does matter this guy got an experience for a little bit of time to be able to deal with his kids while their kids well it mattered well his kids were little wouldn't that wouldn't that be what we should be doing well and I think that's where I was going to turn this to is just I had a fig I had a couple I had like four figs actually had a nonprofit gala the other day yeah and and they had these dried figs on the on the spread I guess it was at the safe families for children gala now anyway they were so good and I was talking with the the next or neighbors at the table with us about you know how it was interesting that Jesus got really excited when the figs were ready to go and annoyed when they were not right and that that was like that simple pleasure of a natural fig of a quarter ounce maybe half ounce of food was really meaningful in those days to those people that walked around you know I had probably one garment yeah that was pretty much there's thing they had sandals you know and if they had a big enough if they were a farmer and they had a big enough crop to buy a couple gallons of olive oil sweet yeah or whatever you know it was I love a simplistic existence that didn't require all that I just I keep leaning further and further into the sermon on the mount this is termed very religious but I lean into the sermon on the mount in which Jesus says like look at the birds of the air they don't store anything up in barns they don't do this you know like I can look at the flowers they like they're like they're clothes more beautifully than you right I mean don't think about it and if he if he's that good to them wouldn't he be that good to you like who he loves even more than these disposable things to some degree and I that's why I'm I'm really I've been fascinated by this experiment with Jordan because he's a really good man like at his core he's a guy that's just earnestly trying to do the best he can with the crafts he's learned over the years he used to build motorcycles like fabulous motorcycles he used to build like he's a barista he told me about him before yeah yeah barista he knows like the the details of coffee knows how the machine thing gets you down the road with the wind in your hair but he also knows the precision of you know making whatever he's making at his aerospace company yeah so now he's translated all of this like artisan ship and like engineering tech into this thing that he loves and all of that he loves music and all it's just like wow shouldn't we celebrate this is the the epitome of the American human experience we should well for him to make aerospace kind of money though he's gonna have to make a lot of guitars and sell them for quite a bit of money he will yeah yeah but he will okay I'm confident that he will you're right and that makes me and even at that if he doesn't make all the money right he was gonna make there yeah he will trait he will make that trait right that says I actually want this yeah I actually want this I'll figure out how to structure my life so like because I want my children like everybody he told me in the garage it was as I was as I don't know December or January last year we were talking and and he said and everybody says to me like don't miss your kids don't miss it you know don't miss the growing up right yeah yeah and he said well I don't know how I like to do that yeah because I got to go to work every day I got to go put my hours in at this place and Boulder and I could go do this thing and drive two hours a day and whatever and I said I'm just gonna I am missing it because I I have no other choice I don't know I don't know how to do this yeah so for media insert myself and say like cool let's fix it yeah isn't that what we should be doing as as Americans there's some that would argue that you know you you shared charity effectively with a guy that had a six-figure job sure you know should you have found three people that really really need to help instead sure I'm I suppose I'd argue him in his out there but I think what happens with him but maybe he creates ten jobs it could be that it could also be that he looks at across the plane of what he sees and says I'm gonna do that in the next garage and then that person says I'm gonna do in the next garage yeah yeah and 20 years from now there are more people doing stuff out of their garage which is the new American farm yeah yeah I mean with technology with everything from 3D printing to AI design support things like that yeah yeah anyway there's thank you Clint for asking the question yeah good question um this episode is sponsored by logo think tank logo think tank provides pure collaboration for business owners we build smart safe places to help business leaders navigate every stage with a business journey and we love what we do and who we do it with our model features gift back minded business veterans and the role of logo facilitators we're always looking for abundance minded individuals to add to our membership facilitator team local community or to feature on this podcast listeners of this podcast who go on to become members of logo think tank get their sixth month of membership for free just mention the local experience podcast on your application to learn more visit our website at logo think tank dot com that's l-o-c-o think tank dot com question um would you like to share a local experience uh uh on this here's probably your six or seven at least session on the local experience um and it was there any how long was this this public session in front of all these scientists and whatever oh we're about an hour and a half of the actual panel but i was there for a day plus an evening so it was like interact with a ton of people there was other yeah Francis Collins was there i didn't talk to him but like you know like these are people that are you know i was going to say like yeah these are like the enemies yeah yeah the enemy here right um was brought wise side there too he wasn't there oh okay no but i was on a podcast with him oh you were i was okay which was really really fun he's uh uh you know something that i followed early on yeah yeah dark horse podcast um so i was on his not on dark horse but i was on this why should i trust you and he was on it oh i see and we uh we had the chance to interact with one another good guy i mean a good thinker for sure good thinker for sure i don't know if he's a good guy but he's a good thinker seems actually pretty good seems reasonable yeah some pretty intimate conversations with his wife about their relationship for sure so i trust that you know it's kind of the truth test is a thing right like who's telling the truth that's hard to know yeah but i do for what for what it's worth i love Tucker Carlson's thing like if the dog trusts you i trust you and i kind of think that's kind of true i had somebody's dog just like get all over me the other day what i was over walk and i was like did your dog is embarrassing but hey i like your dog yep yep he trusts me let's make me feel uh loco experience well let me talk about our band for a second oh yes so we are playing uh the return of your band which started last fall it did uh so i'll give you the backstory a little bit i mean that was my life in my 20s sorry my wife um yes until Napster ruined the music industry and for sure um yeah Napster and apple music actually like destroyed everything after i leaded with the podcast about all that apple did for the podcast yes so so this the other kind of the other side of it that they took advantage first so we were we were a band that we were we were we were on a label out of Nashville called TrueTunes it was a it was a good thing i mean we kind of built our way up into this world we kind of got in ourselves some notoriety we played a lot of places travel all over the country when i was a young man a young man was a lot of fun at a great time um best time you know most unfettered time of my life for sure super fun very few responsibilities yeah i mean you get to the next city right right whatever lot of fun um i turned 50 last july and my wife we'd gone to my cousins 50th birthday which was a lot of fun in a good time but when we were leaving that was in February my my birthdays in july he said my wife said um hey what do you want for your birthday and i said well not that it's just not what i was i was kind of a you know normal 50th birthday roasts and what no no just roasts and you know black balloons and all yeah yeah yeah and i just wasn't he just wasn't a fit for me so we got to my 50th birthday we went to the rodeo and Wyoming with my best friends in the world and we just had a great time and and we had a lovely dinner at a big wonderful steakhouse perfectly adequate 50th birthday perfectly even above that yeah maybe even above it because with really good folks right anyway we got back home and she said are you sure you're you we've done everything you wanted to do for your birthday and i said why i think so and then one night kind of fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night and realized that one of the albums that had gotten us signed which was called out to products um was 25 years old oh and so i said well actually let's do this why don't we have a birthday party for the album and um and we'll celebrate my 50th but we'll also do a celebration of the album that's 25 years old so we put a band together we played it we rented out the realto and something a relationship even of you and yeah or yeah yeah we met that summer that we recorded the album so it was like our so we've been together 25 years yeah the album had been 25 years it was kind of like at all kind of part of your story yeah it all matched in that story so we rented out the realto and had a lovely night it was like there was a lot of fun you were there and there was a lot of fun my son played with us super touching night like yeah big circle of friends of people that you know just i think maybe even far more than the music it was kind of a night the music became an excuse to get all of my friends together and have a good night through the music wasn't half bad either and so we you know we kind of as a band we're like this would be kind of fun to maybe do it again I don't know let's try it again let's do some more stuff so other longtime members of the band went way back or just and then just professional musicians basically are not professional I mean the guys that we've played with a lot right right yeah and because you guys play around do duets and trip yeah we'll play around and I'll play with like my buddy Bryce and we'll do church stuff yeah for sure we've been around a lot we've been in around in northern Colorado music scene in terms of particularly in the Christian world a lot um but we really didn't play our stuff you know it was kind of this like been 23 years since we'd put on a concert like that the night of the reality so we did it it was a lot of fun had a great time and then we just kind of everybody said we should do it more we should do it again but I wanted to use it as a vehicle to sort of help the community if we could yeah so we're playing again in april a couple weeks from now april 10th and oh shit that's coming up I haven't got my ticket it was so far away when I first read it yeah and I know it's here now it's like like 10 days away I'm gonna do Florida yeah let's visit again Andrea Graham I thought it was like at least me no it's all right it's I know I have to insult don't be cake by taking it away because it's all going to charity okay so the great news is like the proceeds from the dr go into the lighthouse which is just this awesome wonderful organization in forecon said is really helping homeless and people with substance abuse abuse issues yeah get on their feet again yeah and they just they've been doing this for men forever and now they just started doing a women's program yeah and so the women's program is trying to buy a house cool and so we're trying to help them raise money for that cool so that that's kind of my and the touching part of this story is really that like for all those years I was trying to play music I was trying to build an audience you know um which is hard to do right we were doing we had some success at that but you know you'd try to go to a city try to build an audience right challenging yeah this is this is the opposite which is for social media oh yeah I wasn't the least like organic oh no like you you had hustle work like you were handing out flyers well and being a concert promoter at that time meant that you could actually succeed in bringing totally people to the show yeah so your stuff and things under umbrella is that parking lot yeah anything you could do like get people to get to this thing right one out of a thousand people were much more willing back then yeah there was a thing about live music for sure yeah sure um that all changed I mean apple music messed all that up wherever you wanted yeah man you know you don't have to go to the record store I remember let's tell my kids the other day like Chipotle on the corner of college and mountain was like or or Laurel was a Rocky Mountain tapes and records which yeah I remember standing in line to buy you two's octang baby right and it was the greatest you know it was like this great experience I'm in high school I got to I got to stand in here is six in the morning and go get that record and when they open I'm skipping school you know all these know that happens anymore you know it's like oh new release Friday like I guess I got some new music you know it's like so we went to the the brothers fountain only music release yeah recently yeah and Jill and they gave away CDs mm-hmm like a for real CD sort of what's that short for compact compact disc I mean it happens what do I play this on Jill's well Jill's Porsche Cayenne that we got back in January has a single disc CD changer and so it's a greatest experience in the world so now I and and we use our the phone holder that we got is it fits in the CD changer slow nice so now I've got one CD in the single disc changer and so at any point in time I can just switch over to a brother's fountain on CD and it sounds so crisp and it's got a cohesive album let's start a song start to finish right 46 minutes start to finish so anyway so anyway we're going to do this so we so we recorded that show in November oh good we're playing on April 10th and we're having you know trying to do this fundraiser for lighthouse but we're also releasing the live vinyl of that night so we have a oh fun so we recorded that night in November and we pressed into some wax we pressed into wax we've got t-shirts and all the thing the thing that's been said to make the vinyl has been the most interesting experience I've had yeah because in terms of the music we used to do CDs that was fairly easy you'd send them a digital deal they can make a bunch of them pretty quick make a thousand into a couple of weeks the vinyl thing is like we'll tell you when we're done so we submitted the masters in February and it's like tight whether we're gonna make it or really yeah because like we got to make every record by hand oh no and I think you know if if you go all the way full circle to this whole conversation there's something about the human scale and the tactile experiences that we have just decided we you know we're like so happy that it's all convened yeah it's another app there's another thing I don't know man there's something about about having a tactile experience that is super super valuable something that we're missing if you want to talk about a low co-experience yeah you know like how do we get back to where we have tactile things I I am I'm tired of driving a cell phone around so so in the fall I decided that I wanted to try to drive it find an old international scout okay and my son in this like in the summer had run into this guy we'd gone down to like look at this he might my son is into cars a little bit so he's like let's go down to Denver there's this collector car thing down in Denver so it's like wondered around whatever nothing drivable it's all like doesn't pass Colorado missions you know it's all like just you just park it in your eyes to say yeah whatever but he ended up going over to conquest motors and Greeley because he was at Garrett's and sports and Greeley which is this like the last locally owned okay you know sporting goods store okay he's over there looking at fishing lures or whatever and he wandered next door to conquest and wandered and said hey does anybody in here build international scouts and the one guy's like yeah actually weird that's like what we do so I ended up commissioning this guy to take a thing and build an international scout it's like a 1970 in line six super cool I actually had lunch today with Russ Hauke from Fort Collins for right for oh yeah okay rolls of 74 I think he's international scout so anyway so I bought this internet I bought this 70s internationals the 1970 international scout guy rebuilt it for me it's it's been awesome but the other night I took it with I took my kids my kids they're wonderful but but they're both seniors they're a little junior friend came in the house at like I don't know nine thirty okay and he's like hey mr. Everett we need to go to target will you take us and I was like yeah I guess whatever let's go right so we jump in this international scout with my two sons and their buddy right and he has an experience he's never done and he's never been in a car like that like where you smell the gas and the whole you know they go whole thing it's like this is like slam in the door and it's bang you know everything is like bumpy and we're driving down and and my son in the back seat who loves music Emerson who plays in the band with us is he puts on Pearl Jam's 10 nice which is like my high school album right you know yeah he puts on Pearl Jam 10 and we're driving down the road and all of a sudden my other son is like wow this is quite a vibe right because it they've never experienced anything like it right everything is super cushion quiet and comfortable and this is wow you can hear the engine it's like oh and like you got to start it and it's like not quite you know man we're not starting to get like crank it a couple of times and like the whole thing of this you know exhaust coming out and there's no ways and dirty you can take the top off okay so it's got a roll bar yeah yeah yeah little jumper seat in the back anyway luxury item you know sure out of touch totally whatever mansplaining the whole thing I get it the whole thing if everyone wants to make a criticism of it but but the point of it was like we have missed we have thrown away as a culture the tactile experience of like walking running driving yeah what does it mean to do these things listen to a CD listen to a record yeah yeah yeah we have decided the convenience is way more important than that yeah which comes back to this local conversation which is look I think our normal local business owners are local ability to engage with one another our interpersonal relationships are far more important than whether our portfolios are ever bigger than they were and that it will be even more important once we have to go with the individuated currencies of some sort of system because the feds can't no longer they can't do it well in four columns is one of the greatest benefactors that right like we got all these federal research organizations and we got you know even beyond our it will be traditional living beyond our means we get juiced by the fence it'll be a train wreck coming but I hope that the train wreck is reassemblable yeah in a in a method in which we look at and say like let's not do that again yeah let's learn from our mistakes the spirit of once per nurse and maybe reflurged by it could we do better without depending upon a failing system like I think there's definitely a way where most people are way better off in 20 years I think sir no it might be 50 you could be three generation problem potentially right but the denominator we have to fix the denominator right in our system and we we just that's going to take a lot of that's a lot of uphill battles but I think if we could yeah our children our grandchildren the people that are behind us if we stop rolling that denominator we can actually multiply civilization we can actually make a civilization well there it is always fun fixed it thanks Aaron um do you have a book coming out or anything like that no books uh the what's the why should I trust you podcasts yeah that's a good one to listen to I think that's good in this medical space especially yeah that one's that one's really good besides the revolution stuff yeah I still am I have been a little bit discouraged by the war stuff so I've kind of been quiet the last few weeks because I don't really there is a sense of repentance in a little bit of what I've participated in um to some degree although you know take it with a grain of salt in an American experiment that is pretty brutal and pretty empirical um but I have been a little discouraged by the sense that we have to go out and yeah blow people up to make a better life or whatever their promises is you know thankfully the one thing I will say in all of this is that at least this administration wasn't disingenuous about like false conversations about what they want to do they just were like let's go do it right so like I kind of was spared the lie of weapons of mass destruction of what you know right but let's draw with it like these guys are bad we'll go I sort of was spared all of that I just like no I was going to blow shit up right I guess I guess there's something okay in that that's very much more neuro than anything and so you're sort of I don't know pleasure that there's a neuro weirdly instead of like a George W Bush who just lied to you the whole time right I don't know I don't know maybe that's not good but at least it was honest it in the end the Epstein files will come out somewhere somebody somebody is going to say the truth about why our government is beholden to a minor player in the world you think that's related to the Epstein files I do we'll leave you off with the ideas for now you got more years of public intellectualism first before they wake up we'll see let's call it sounds good time out very good Godspeed Godspeed