What New Zealand can Learn from El Salvador with Techemy CEO, Fran Strajnar

Webinar Recording and Transcript

Date: 23/05/2024

Host: Kevin Whitmore, Business Innovation Advisor at Callaghan Innovation

Guests: Fran Strajnar - Founder @ Techemy.Capital

Webinar Length: 01:09:00

[00:00:00] Introduction

Kevin: Very happy to welcome Fran to today's discussion. So I'll let him introduce himself very briefly shortly. Fran, where do we find you at the moment?

Fran: Like physically, I'm in the first of all, thanks for having me on. Great to be here. I moved to El Salvador about 12 months ago.

Kevin: Cool. So what time is it for you at the moment? Late afternoon ish?

Fran: Yeah, exactly. It's quarter to four.

Kevin: Nice. Very cool. So for those that don't know who Fran is, do you want to just take us through maybe a little bit about your background, a bit about Techemy we'll start there and then we'll dive into the El Salvador stuff.

Fran: Yeah, I guess it's part of the furniture of this industry, I suppose, at this point I got introduced to Bitcoin in the super early days of 2010, 11, and I just ignored it like everybody else. Yeah. And then in 2013, I reread the white paper and went, Oh, we're separating money from state. Perfect. And then I did the budding entrepreneur thing of starting businesses, focusing on infrastructure looking at, you know, how are we going to get this data into the legacy world?

One thing led to another and we ended up realizing that there's a real lack of I guess advisors in this space that can thread together all the complexities of capital markets with this web 3 technology so we ended up doing, I don't know, five, six hundred million dollars worth of deal structuring and capital raising.

For projects like Chainlink and Bancor and Salt Lending and a few others. We're sort of more focusing on guess quality over quantity. Just looking after a couple of critical infrastructure projects that we feel are missing from this industry to incubate and help capitalize and then push out the market and all the rest.

But I mean, over the years, we've done so many different things including running some of the first conferences in New Zealand. We had Vitalik Simptonopoulos, Geoffrey Tucker, Geoff Greyweb, all these, you know, people from days past As early as 2014, we had Bitcoin South, the first conference, and then we had a couple of Ethereum based conferences that we collaborated on.

And then you attended the security token conference from memory in Millbrook Resort down in Queenstown, which was like an executive only 100 person max event. You know all the leaders at the time of security tokens and even some stock exchange representatives that showed up from various countries.

And then actually, funny enough, after that, I turned around to the team and I said now that we've had a very successful security token conference, we're not going to do anything in security tokens for the next five years. And that was back in 2018. And the team was like, what? You know, we just had this, this whole huge event and everyone had such a great time.

Why would we not want to? You know, tap into this and it was very clear that because of the fragmented liquidity and the regulation, it's just going to take a number of years to mature and it's exactly what happens. It's only really now this year that security tokens are possible because of distribution and licensing and exchanges and other considerations.

Yeah, I've sat on a bunch of boards, I've incubated a few projects, I act as a sounding board to various founders and teams. And I'm trying to frankly simplify my life for the last couple of years.

[00:03:27] Over the past ten years, and reasons to move to El Salvador

Kevin: That sounds awesome. Yeah, so that's exactly right. I think last time you and I caught up was actually in, in 2018 physically down in Queenstown. And just looking back, I guess at that stage as well, I mean, you, you brought over a lot of OGs from the, from the industry. So there was, there was, there was that we're talking about Yeah, security tokens at the time.

I guess fast forward to now you know, six years later, we've got the Bitcoin ETFs possibly well, looking likely for an Ethereum ETF. You've got MicroStrategy involved, you've got BlackRock here, you've 10X'd in price in terms of the whole ecosystem. Maybe take us through the last six years.

Like, you know, we, we talked about, you know, putting, pushing pause on, on security tokens until they were ready. What, what's been keeping you busy for, for sort of that, that, that time since then?

Fran: Yeah, sure. Well, let's go even, let's go back even further, just super quickly. Right. So I call them epochs.

Every four year cycle is a bit of a different set of market participants. So in the very early days of 2010 to 2013, 14, arguably there was kind of like, you know, the nerds and the anarcho capitalists and the cryptographers and the cyberpunks, and there was no real Wall Street whatsoever, like, we wouldn't touch it, kind of laughed at it, frankly.

And then the next cycle, I guess, 2014 through to 2019, we had the first big wave of like family offices, private equity, we saw the rise of what I called the protocol wars, you know the early days of smart contracts and are there going to be other chains? And then there was core to our free and all these kind of consortiums that came out sort of finding their feet with enterprise beginning to dip their feet in and, you know, a lot of it laid out of the, the big four kind of advising the international companies of how to use this technology. And I'm very quiet in the background. There was much more involvement than people care to know from central banks. They were watching this and keeping an eye on it far more during that sort of early era than people realised. Cause obviously it threatens their entire existence.

And then in the 2018 through the 24 period, we saw, we, we jumped the gap, we crossed the chasm the sort of classic market adoption or market cycle sort of wording of that. And we saw real disruption to several industries particularly remittance and payments. I mean, today we pay all of our contractors in stable coins.

Just because it's so much easier than the friction within the legacy system, and that friction is getting unworkable at this point in some areas. So this, this is only still the beginning, but what's, what's kept me busy is effectively trying to just survive the lunacy of COVID and I decided to follow the Bitcoin dream and move to a country that's adopting Bitcoin laws.

But also specifically El Salvador has some of the best securities laws on the planet. Not many people realize it's not just about legal tender and the sort of tax free on technology and communications companies and other attractive reasons for bitcoin specific companies, but the securities laws are the asset protection provisions are really good.

So this whole country has changed radically, which we'll get into, I'm sure. But yeah, I've been keeping an eye on it for at least four years watching Bukele's reformation efforts. and we pulled the trigger when it became safe enough, right? Because even six months prior to moving here one year ago today.

Well, one year ago last week or two weeks ago. Six months prior to that, there was still, you know, MS 13 gang members with head to toe tattoos. And each tattoo was a crime, you know, that they wear like a badge of honor. So The friends that we have, the community that we've built here, they tell us stories of even six, nine months prior to us showing up and how radically different it is.

So now capital is pouring in and we're just seeing the first of the security token issuances through Bitfinex securities to kind of show that it is now a thing. But I can dive into whatever subjects you think is relevant.

Kevin: That's cool. So maybe we just go into the genesis of that. So 12 months ago I remember you, you tweeted actually you know, now's the time kind of taking businesses shifting over the air.

And I think, you know, Bukele actually retweeted that statement as well. So maybe just talk us through, you know, I think you mentioned four years in terms of the planning but what was maybe the, the, the, the push? What, when, what sort of made you, was it, was it around that safety aspect or was it something to do with the securities laws?

What, what was kind of that final tipping point in terms of saying, right, we're off?

Fran: Well, frankly, it was the wokeness in New Zealand that couldn't tolerate it anymore. Just that enough. You've seen the brain drain that's occurred across New Zealand, Australia, and the Commonwealth. So that aspect was definitely a major factor.

It was like, you know, if your environment sucks, change your environment. The other way to look at it is, you know, you have to ask yourself, do you want to be in a country that's going like this, or do you want to be in a country that's going like this? Now El Salvador is starting at a way lower base, like way lower.

It is a fertile country. It was the number one murder capital of the planet. 18, 24 months ago. But to actually live in a, in a country where capital's pouring in wages are going up people are building, people are starting new businesses the atmosphere, the psychological kind of landscape is vastly different to operate in.

And that's super important to me. Right? So the last six years of the previous administration in New Zealand, The devastating and reckless, you know, monetary and fiscal policy of that era. It's going to take a generation to work through unless radical spending cuts occur in New Zealand like Argentina is seeing now, right?

So we just realized, okay, we could slog it through here, but there's zero incentive to try and, you know scale a New Zealand based business. There's no tax incentives. It's difficult to find staff because talent is leaving. The, you know, child poverty and the what do you call it, cost of living crisis is, like, really apparent.

And people just seem to be kind of miserable throughout the Commonwealth generally, so sorry to be that blunt about it, but you know it's, it's, it's just simply a matter of, like, living in a place that's growing versus not. That's what it came down to.

Kevin: Well, now we're here for bluntness.

It's all good. Didn't expect anything.

Fran: Don't worry, those that know me, now I can be a lot more blunt. From an El Salvador perspective. It's culminated, right? So, like, the desire to be not in New Zealand, and the safety and securities laws in El Salvador, they crossed over about a year ago. And so I actually talked to everyone I possibly could, including the two guys that wrote the securities laws and the digital asset framework and Bitcoin laws And it, it kind of got matured to a point where it's like, okay, this is workable.

I can actually advise customers or even consider for my own businesses, the issuance of assets and securities inside this framework and jurisdiction. And then, you know, the, the re election, which was pretty much guaranteed for Bokele with a 97 percent support basis. That was only around the corner, it was like one year away, so that just occurred in I think it was March.

And obviously that represents stability, knowing that policy, or at least the trajectory, is not going to change for at least another four years thereabouts. So that, that kind of gave further confidence to, okay, this is practical, I can work here, and nothing's really going to change from the trajectory.

[00:11:46] Migration and visas in El Salvador

Kevin: And maybe logistically, I know I've had a look at I guess the, the structure around migration and visas and things like that, and there seemed to be quite a forward focused look at that. How did you personally find that process of migrating over? I think they've got a digital nomad visa, they've got a freedom visa, which can be paid in Bitcoin.

How was that process?

Fran: Super easy. So there are plenty of Duolingo speakers that can handle all the paperwork. So we literally paid, like, first and foremost, you enter the country and we went Auckland, Vancouver, overnight due to flights and how they're scheduled. Vancouver to Mexico, right? The airport hotel was nowhere near the airport in Vancouver and it was just the most fentanyl, you know hell hole that I've ever stayed in my life.

And then we went to Mexico city. which was the single worst airport experience of my life and I've traveled extensively. And then we got to El Salvador and it's beautiful. It's a new airport. Everyone's smiling. Everyone's friendly. The queues are super short. Everything is uber efficient. You pay your 21 bucks as a tourist.

You get a six month instant tourist visa, right? So the first six months come on over super easy, you know. And then we, we paid a professional to deal with our Nomad visa, which we applied for. And you just need basically like a police check in New Zealand or the country of origin. And then you need to, basically they pick you up, they take you to the police station to get a local check, and then they pick you up and they take you to the immigration office and they just say, sign here.

And they do all the translation and everything. And then 25 days later, a little Salvadorian id, ID comes along they call it a Dewey. And we now just simply have to be in the country, I think for eight months of the year, for the next five years, and we get a free passport at the end of that.

They have offered this sort of 1 million dollar per passport. You know, you just skip that five year wait. But, since you get a 6 month visa and it's easy to get residency, do you really want to spend a million bucks when you put it into bitcoin?

[00:14:07] Opportunities that NZ can benefit from

Kevin: Fair enough. Cool. And just in terms of, I guess, from the outside view, obviously El Salvador is on a tear in terms of all its investment strategies, it's volcano bonds Bitcoin city other types of foreign investment what, what do you think New Zealand could learn out of that example?

I mean, what's, what's sort of, what's an opportunity that you could see, or, or, you know, it's, it seems to be that it's so open and forward thinking. I'm just trying to see what, what sort of the, the, you think New Zealand could benefit or adopt that you've seen happen in El Salvador?

Fran: Well, I think the biggest benefit and the biggest activity in El Salvador is the anti corruption purge.

So let's just contextualize that for a little bit. Because people don't really realize what happened here and people barely realize what's actually happening in New Zealand. There are certain similarities. So, first and foremost, the Defense Intelligence Division provided by Bukele with some information showing that the MS 13 gang members are funded and organized by offshore interest, so that places them into what's called enemy combatant status, and it's governed under the laws of arms conflicts, not for the highly corrupt judiciary, right? It would have taken 60, 100 years to process that many, you know murders and all the rest for the legacy. So he actually went around and watched them go around and around between the kind of Supreme Court, the legislative branch, and the judiciary saying, here's, here's information, here's intel of the source of this country's problems.

What are you going to do about it? And in the process of doing that, several people that are complicit quit, so he got rid of a bunch of corrupt judges and a bunch of corrupt politicians and so on and so forth in that process, so he wasn't actually able to pass the exemption regime, which is the law that allowed for the rounding up of all the gangsters for his first two years.

I am grossly simplifying things for the academics out there that, that will, like, pull me up on some of this just because it's such a dense subject matter. So once he cleaned up kind of, like, the kinetic. threats the, the gangsters. He started going after the non kinetic threats, which is systemic institutionalized corruption throughout mayors and throughout councils and throughout, you know the administrative bodies.

He, One of the biggest benefits to stock wasteful spending? Well, firstly, when they got rid of the gangsters, you have to appreciate that the country got an immediate, but ongoing 23% boost to its gross domestic products. Right? Because these bandidos would sit there with basically like shotguns and wait for the truck to show up and offload to the supermarket.

And until you pay their bribe, you're not allowed to resupply your supermarket. or something as basic as having a coffee cart. Somebody will watch you all day. At the end of the day, they'll say, they'll slip you a piece of paper and says, you sold this many coffees. This is how much protection money you owe me.

So with that gone overnight, there was a one time, but on permanent increase in GDP, which increased the velocity of money. It gave people a lot more ability to spend. And with the safety added on, Then that compounded the velocity of money because people started to put together their own businesses, right?

There's so many small businesses that have been opened up and that's kind of the base, the base work. New Zealand doesn't really have a gang problem to anywhere near the extent of what happened here, maybe a small one. But the next phase might be more relevant, which is the anti corruption purge at the political level.

Right, so just this week he arrested, I think it was 12 ex mayors and about 30 of their staff for basically you know, thieving from the public funds for various projects. You know, they build a road here and then they don't build a road and then they ask for more funding to build a road and then you pay for the same road five times and it's still not built because all the money's been siphoned up of due to cryptocracy and epitomism and everything else. So he also produced the amount of territories or councils. We would, I guess, call them I'm in New Zealand. So instead of having, I think it was a hundred something or 80, something, he produced it down to 23 because there's just so much bloat and unnecessary bureaucracy and salaries, and, you know, it's we don't need this big of a government for a tiny country of only 5 million people, but that's A quarter of the size physically of New Zealand. So, I would love to see a hard anti corruption purge across the NGOs, academia, media, politicians in New Zealand. People think New Zealand is this wonderful place that's, you know, doesn't have such things, it does, and a lot of it.

So that's definitely one, one thing that I would like to eventually see in New Zealand is some honesty and an anti corruption purge. Secondly, why not start a special economic zone somewhere? Why not restructure the taxes to make it attractive, but you can't do that without the fundamental overhaul of the Reserve Bank.

So one of the key things they did here is that effectively the Treasury Department of the, you know, democratically elected government this is a republic, which is a little different, but, you know, it's a country. It's a constitutional republic with democratic elections, so it's, it's not a pure democracy, it's very much like the United States which is also a constitutional republic, and New Zealand is obviously not that, but until you fix the money, a lot of the societal issues in New Zealand can't be addressed. I mean, if we're being honest with ourselves throughout, with the cover of COVID, we went from zero interest rates to jacking up those interest rates super hard, but only after giving away tons of stimulus money and flooding this money supply and increasing government spending to insane levels in New Zealand.

And so what that created was an intentional destruction of the middle class in New Zealand. That's why everything's going up . The value of the purchasing power of the New Zealand peso is going down, right? So until we actually cut spending and back the New Zealand dollar with something you know, hard assets, like 70 percent of the world's now doing for the bricks. They're all backing their respective currencies with gold or other hard assets. Then there's no value anchor. Right, they keep saying that the CBDCs will bring some form of value anchor. It won't. It's just technocratic control that it brings. So, New Zealand's got a lot of systemic structural changes that need, reformations that need to go ahead, but honestly, it's not that hard.

Like, you just look at Argentina and what Malay's doing. You know, just getting rid of entire government departments and just this useless bloat bureaucracy, deregulation, you know, get rid of five regulations for every new one that's passed, very simple policies that can be enacted, fix the money, maybe set up a special economic zone and make, you know, put New Zealand on the map and you'll, you're going to see billions of dollars pouring back in.

But it feels like New Zealand's a little too busy being attacked from. Losers that didn't win the last election. The system, the media is completely 100 percent in their pocket. So, anything positive that comes out, is attacks, is, you know, lawsuits, it's called the lawfare that ties them up, that binds their hands.

The, new government struggles to do anything, even if it's positive, because they just get pain. You have to expend time and money and effort and energy on justifying and re justifying every tiny small action because 100 percent of the media just everyday articles of like, you know, fake news.

[00:22:21] Prospera network state & Bitcoin City

Kevin: How, how likely do you think a sort of a network state like a Balaji Trinivasan type approach might work in New Zealand?

Just in terms of some of the things that you're talking about and helping with maybe, maybe not reform, but pockets of people mobilizing in terms of different ways of adopting monetary assets and things like that. Any thoughts on that?

Fran: Yeah, I mean, so I'm an advisor to Prospera, which is the first proper network state. For context, Prospera is in the island of Roatan in Honduras. And about four years ago, sorry, six years ago Eric Brin and what's his name Joel, the two founders convinced the Honduran government, the previous government, to make certain constitutional changes that allow for the creation of Prospera, which is sort of a country in a country.

They're allowed to tax their own citizens, they're allowed to register businesses, they're allowed to issue digital residency, e residency you can go to prospero. co, sign up, pay 120 bucks a year for the cheapest kind of membership. And then you can immediately open a business in that jurisdiction with a 1 percent a year tax structure.

It's pretty damn attractive. And it's not like this physical area is prosperous. It's more like a legal area, if you will. And so you don't need to say where in New Zealand, like, you know, and then, then that gets into like, well, who owns that land? Do we get, how do we buy up that land? You could just create a virtual network state.

Legally, as a structure within New Zealand, potentially. That would, that would, you know, have certain interest, but yeah, a lot of money is pouring into Prospera, which is the best example, and I think the next city state will be Bitcoin City here in El Salvador. That's realistically going to be another couple of years before they start actually auctioning off the land. They have to accumulate. You know, the territory in an ethical way, then they have to put the roads, plumbing, internet, sewage, all of that. But in preparation to that various Korean corporates and investors have worked with the government and invested to create a deep water port, which is of huge strategic significance because they can offload from all of Asia, Middle East, there's no deep water port until you get to, you know, Northern Mexico, and then you've got California and Alaska beyond that, you know, Seattle as well.

So the plan here is a combination of legal reforms. As well as structural infrastructure investments, and together, they turn El Salvador into a leader of Central America and a powerhouse, an economic powerhouse. So, in a tangible way to sort of understand that imagine that we're in 2030. And there's a light rail that goes, that's actually built, you know like, in California, they spend billions of dollars, and 10 years later, it's only 2 kilometers of rail laid, similar to the Auckland light rail project, but they actually build it, and it goes from Panama to Bitcoin City, which is by the deepwater port, and then all the way to Mexico City.

And now you can service the entire Central American coast and put tariffs and taxes and whatever to draw income from that strategic infrastructure which is, you know, like the literal plan here as part of the infrastructure. Then you add on top nuclear energy. Like, why doesn't New Zealand go to nuclear?

It's safe in it, and it's you know, compact, I think they're up to third or fourth generation thorium reactors, and the government here just signed an MOU the Korean nuclear energy provider to roll out compact thorium clean energy nuclear reactors by 2030 you know, I, I believe that there was power rationing in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago because of, you know, You're running out of energy during winter or something, which is just incomprehensible considering the amount of dams and hydroelectric that New Zealand has and these things shouldn't be a problem.

So, I think some of the stigmas just need to go away and you know, to, to just have a government, hopefully, that can actually roll out common sense policy about food security, energy security, economic freedoms because all we've seen is more and more constrictions, right? VASPs, FATF KYC, AML, CFT LMNOP, KFC, the whole alphabet of friction of moving money around, right?

And if you can't move money around quickly, it's difficult to operate a business, to scale a business, to advertise a business, so on and so forth.

[00:27:23] Bitcoin & KYC

Kevin: Yeah. Maybe, maybe we talk a little bit about that as well, just in terms of the friction of money. I did see that El Salvador was talking about adding in KYC AML for any Bitcoin purchases greater than $200 U. S., and I think Bitcoin Beach was talking about that. You might be able to talk about whether that actually happened or what you're seeing on the ground just be interested to see whether that actually came into through these words correctly into reality or not?

Fran: That sounds like some wires may have been crossed somewhere because what actually happened is that Barcheli got rid of KYC for all transactions under 25, 000. So when we first got here, we were delighted to see that we could go to the major supermarket chains and pay with lightning for our groceries. Right? So, just so you know, I got rid of all my bank accounts. four years ago sold all my hard assets property etc and we were worried that we wouldn't be able to pay for, I don't know, groceries, and whatever, internet, starlink.

We can, we live off the bitcoin standard everything we pay for is lightening. It's, there's always a work around if they don't directly accept it but at this point it's way less friction than wire transferring domestically or whatever. So we were asked for our ID if, if the supermarket shopping was over 200 and we were like, okay, this is too much.

Awkward. I mean, it's, we're buying food, right? But it's because of the historic problems of 50 years of civil war and corruption and credit card, you know clawbacks and the credit card companies put pressure on the Department of Economics, who then, you know, had these rules, but that's been lifted.

So this is I hope that answers your question. It's completely the opposite of, you know, KYC online transactions.

[00:29:19] Lightning adoption & state of lightning

Kevin: Really good to know. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, I didn't realize you'd gone full Bitcoin standard. That's quite, quite impressive. Maybe just to add on to that, like, how has the Lightning adoption been?

Is it, is it everywhere, or there's some places where you still need U. S. dollars to kind of transact that kind of haven't gone there or what's that been like?

Fran: Yeah, sure. So there's 2 parts to this, the state of lightning and the state of actually using lightning and for living in El Salvador. So when I say that we can.

We can live off the Bitcoin standard easily. It is in part because there's tons of ATMs and ways to just turn lightning Bitcoin into cash, right? And the country here, unfortunately, does use the United States Peso. So if they don't directly accept Bitcoin then, you know, you just use cash or we have what's called a DITOBANKS card, D I T O B A N X dot com, and I send it Lightning Bitcoin or USDC.

I have a physical MasterCard, I can swipe it, the merchant gets dollars, but it deducts my USDC or Bitcoin balance, right? So. I still consider that good enough because it's a frictionless experience to load a balance on this card. It doesn't force the merchants to change what they do and how they do it.

But at the same time, you know, it takes a while for people to natively directly accept Bitcoin. And so we go to the farmer's market and all the various different expats that have set up businesses here. In partnership with the locals, which is super important. So for example, there's a business called Beef Back Better, you know, to play on words to the with Marxists Build Back Better stuff.

And they go up into the hills and they get organic beef and they check that they're not using pesticides and Monsanto products and anything like that. And then they buy whole beasts and slaughter them and, you know deliver them as prime beef. And of course they exit Bitcoin. Same with rural organic farms that delivered.

The first thing we had to find was foods that is to a quality that we expect because a lot of the foods in the supermarkets is, you know, low quality still that will change over time, but we found that we were shocked at how quickly we were able to find a reliable, multiple reliable sources of organic fruit and veg, and there's way cheaper, even if delivered, even when organic compared to, you know, the local food supermarket in New Zealand, So paying for a phone Internet that they accept Bitcoin directly, paying for rent we magic Bitcoin into dollars and there's a workaround for that. It's paying for Taxis or Ubers, we can do most of that in Bitcoin paying for, you know, a night out, coffee, dinner, etc. Many restaurants accept Bitcoin.

If they don't, we use a Bitcoin card, so they end up with dollars and we're using Bitcoin anyway. So, between hybrids and native adoption. It's good enough. But the state of the state of lightning is what I wanna touch on quickly as well. So if, if you sort of hear the podcasts in the Twitter, you know, crypto, Twitter, a lot of people are moaning about you know, well Lightning doesn't scale and this, that, and the other. You know, nobody uses lightning and, and like we use it every day and it just works. Like maybe one out of 50 transactions is a lightning channel that's stuck or something, and it's really immaterial. It's just a small inconvenience compared to how we used to live without this stuff. So, like, this is probably like one of the biggest places for lightning adoption.

And it's also attracted a phenomenal amount of lightning developers from all around the world, and Nostra developers, and, you know, various different built on Bitcoin technology stacks that are coming up. That's quite some interesting kind of deal flow that's popped up. There's also several native wallets as well.

You know, Bitcoin Beach Wallet turned into, I forget what their rebrand is. So, I guess I would answer your question differently if this was 18 months ago, but at this point, it just works. We make do and there's hybrid solutions that sort of patch the gaps, so to speak.

Kevin: Cool. And I, did I read right that you bought a car in Bitcoin as well?

Fran: No comment. But yeah, he can, he can buy, he can buy assets in Bitcoin. In fact, there's a couple of Dutch guys that help, you know, gringos, expats like me. If we don't want to deal with like, you know, my Spanish is not very good. So they help with the checking out the vehicle Making sure it's fits and it's not a scam and it's not sort of serious problems.

But then most usefully, most importantly, we just give them Bitcoin and they figure out how the seller gets dollars. So again, it's a workaround, but there's plenty of these types of services.

[00:34:18] Bitcoin vs the crypto ecosystem

Kevin: o Yeah. And seeing all this work in action and, you know, I guess the success of living on the Bitcoin standard, lightning, working, et cetera.

Has that changed your. Perspective on the broader crypto ecosystem in general, is it more about Bitcoin for you now than crypto, or do you think That hasn't changed it at all. What's, what's kind of your take on the, on the broader ecosystem?

Fran: Yeah, I guess it took me a few cycles to embrace my inner maxi, but let's, let's maybe define what a maximalist is.

So I am a Bitcoin maximalist in the sense that the definition means that, you know, I think that Bitcoin is the greatest asset in the world. I'm not a toxic maximalist, which is basically a fascist that thinks it's okay to tell people what property they're allowed to own and transact in, right? So some people thrive to argue and Twitter's full of these toxic maxis and they love, you know being toxic.

And I just, I don't understand it. It's like, don't you just want to not create friction? A controversy, so people think this is hardcore maxi kind of terror toxic maxi territory But it's really the same age old rule of like five percent are the loudest and they sound like they're 95 and then, there's a couple of you know talking heads on Twitter that just are basically pathological liars and they just want the eyeballs and the attention and they empower people to some of these people to become toxic.

So there's that element here, right. In fact, I've talked to a number of expats, went to a number of meetups and then it's like, is it okay to talk about Solana? And like, what if people find out I wasn't a developer on Solidity? You know, are they going to hang me here? Because somebody on Twitter said that I'll go to jail with the MS 13 gang members.

And it's like, no, the Bitcoin laws. are actually digital asset laws, and there is, there's no crime touching non Bitcoin code or working on non Bitcoin projects. But there's so many scams compared to the early days when it was genuine innovation, and people genuinely wanted to decentralize and disrupt using smart contracts.

Now, it's like, look at the meme cycle. It's just utter garbage, and, you know, society's become, generally in the West, a lot more hedonistic. Over the last decades, and so there's a lot of like get rich quick BS out there and it taints the kind of world view.

So yeah, I guess I've become a bit more of a maxi, but it's appropriate, like this country has Bitcoin standards, but plug that in and it's saying it's 0 percent anyway, so that's not good.

[00:37:04] Impending challenges

Kevin: Okay, okay, that all makes sense.

Yeah, so I think we've talked about this in the past, you and I, and, and just, I guess there's, I know you've got this concern that obviously, I mean, well known that the, the world's going through quite a, a change at the moment. But you've got quite, I guess, strong beliefs.

Fran: Gentle way to put it, you know.

Kevin: Which was going to be my next question. Tell us a bit about your thoughts. I know you've got some quite strong feelings towards sort of an impending challenge that the world's going to face in the next kind of six to 12 months. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? I mean, we've obviously got fourth turning kind of discussions happening there as well.

Take us through some of those thoughts.

Fran: I mean, do you think we're back to pre 2020 normal? Like, do you, do you, do you not feel there is a climate on multiple level threads? So, I, I just, I knew that because I worked in the media before Bitcoin, that the media, the forefast state is dead, and how dangerous that is, right?

And when you have, you know, Decades and decades and decades of cursory, you know printing money and charging interest on it, you end up with an egregious consolidation of wealth over time and you end up with this psychopathic kind of elite that have never worked a day in their lives in multiple generations.

And so what do you do? You have infinite resources and you control entire governments through blackmail and espionage and whatever. Well, you've reshaped the world in your own image which is why we saw the soft coup in the West over the COVID periods, using that to do mail in ballots and consolidate power and all the rest, like, the time for mincing words is over, so much information is poured out.

We're now at the kind of public awakening phase where people are starting to realize that there are some serious problems and you know, just look at what's happening in the Middle East. I don't want to pick sides. I think this gross atrocity is all over the place, right? You saw what happened in Eastern Europe over the last 30 years and then Victoria Nuland in 2014 you know, wherever she goes, there's a, there's a coup in that country that follows.

And so you know, the entire country's got turned into, frankly, money laundering centers. And then they became so insanely corrupt. That's, we're now end up with kinetic conflict in some regions of the world. And so until the public realizes the extent to which we've been lied to you know, we need to avoid civil conflicts.

So I think what's happening now is that people are getting pissed off about all sorts of things. Like look at America. We have the most critical elections ever in America's history. And coming up in November. And we're now starting to see just the most insane rhetoric imaginable, and it's going to get crazier, right, from all sides so there's a political threads, there's a kinetic military thread, there's a socioeconomic thread, there's the end of the fiat money system thread, like they can't print more, they can't raise rates so many countries are at record levels you know debt to GDP.

Money needs to be fixed because it's the root cause of all of these issues and I'm just the guy that's a macroanalyst at the end of the day. I'm just looking at this stuff going, okay, well, if we play forward this trajectory, then, you know It's going to get super obvious. So it's, you know, humans suck at understanding or comprehending the passage of time.

Remember, it was just two weeks to slow the curve. And then all of a sudden we were this close to having like, show me your papers, basically in a, in a technocratic way. And the world did a 180 on those digital IDs, except for Australia last week, which brought them back under a new guise, right? And we can talk about that in a minute.

But I'm just looking at these trends, and I'm realizing that things are going to get worse Like, to me, it has been obvious, but it's now becoming obvious to everyday people, people that are busy with their mortgages and their kids soccer practice or ballet practice and their picket fence and their job security and, you know, living their lives and being normal.

Now, it's affecting everybody because it's hard to make ends meet, it's hard to make mortgage payments, it's hard to buy food on the table, 200 bucks three years ago got you a lot of groceries compared to what 200 bucks buys you now. Right? And people don't stop and reflect and demand change until they're brought to the precipice and they're forced to demand change that way.

And this is more appropriate for the EU and North America and the Commonwealth than it is for, frankly, most of the bricks nations, where they don't have these kind of issues with their money, or less and less of these issues. So, I could go on and on about this subject, because this is the biggest subject in the world, but your question is like what is my general view?

I think things are going to get biblically, catastrophically, comically worse. It's becoming obvious. And then we're going to get rid of the parasites. And we're going to have a thousand years of peace and technological advancement and a new, you know, golden age or renaissance, whatever you want to call it, because the money is being fixed in this process.

But it can't be fixed. Until enough people are frankly pissed off and said, that's it. We've had enough. We're not taking your, you know, technocratic solutions to the problems you've caused in the first place.

Kevin: Yeah. And I guess another one's Japan, right? My wife's just came back from two weeks in Japan.

I asked her about on the ground, I guess, understanding of what's happening with the yen. And she said, there just isn't any, it's interesting. They're seeing the indirect impact of what what's happening there, but not directly aware of why or all those sorts of things.

Fran: Japan is a very interesting case because, yeah, again, let me, let me read you something that I discovered by accident this morning.

That's a post somewhere on the Internet from 2013. It's, it's short. It's like 4 paragraphs. I'll rush through it. This adds context. There will be no collapse. Again, this is from 2013. There will be no collapse the way that some people think of it. It's not going to be like the movie Dawn of the Dead or whatever where one day suddenly shit hits the fan and prices skyrocket and everyone begins to riot and the SS comes marching down the street to kill everyone.

There will be no happening. It's far more insidious than that. Read the poem The Hollow Man by T. S. Eliot and you'll understand. You'll just notice that every day simple things become more expensive. Everyone's homes and apartments will start to get smaller. Your work hours will get longer, but your pay will decrease.

You'll see your family and friends less and find that in time you care less about them. Every day you'll find yourself lowering your standards for everything, work, food, relationships, etc. Job security will no longer exist as a concept. You'll notice houses and apartments shrinking. People will start hanging on to clothing for longer and longer.

Less people will get married, even less will have children. People will engross themselves in technological distractions and fantasy, while they never truly experience the real world. Whatever dream people used to have about their lives were going to be, will become for them a distant memory. The only thing left for them will be the reality of their debts and their poverty.

And every minute of every day, they will be told, you are stupid, you are ugly, you are weak, but together, you know, with the government, you will be safe. That is the collapse, the reduction, this is specifically to America, the reduction of the American man into a feudalist serf, incapable of feeling love or hate, incapable of seeing the pitiful nature of the situation, or, you know, what it is, or reorganizing his own self worth.

So, it's kind of blunt and brutal, but it's the slow creep. That's that I'm worried about. That slow creep has greatly accelerated because of the BS and frauds around COVID. That's really woken a lot of people up. And so what I think is happening now is, I call it the great boomerang. People are starting to realize they're being gypped on a number of fronts.

They, they, the, the lies just don't stick anymore. Elon with his reformation of Twitter or X I, I just love the fact that, you know, there's like Trudeau and Macron make it community noted so that like when they say the economy's never been better, there is no inflation, you know, it's, there's a community note saying, actually the inflation's the worst. They've been in Canada. Here's, here's hard data, right? So it's like instant, stop to narrative attempts, right, because the world runs on narratives, and that is probably one of the biggest drivers of free and, you know, without free speech you can't hold people accountable, especially those that are supposed to be representatives of the people that elected them.

And yeah, the world's in a precarious place where just wouldn't be surprised to see, you know, another pandemic just in time for the next U. S. elections in November.

[00:46:18] What's on the horizon

Kevin: Yeah, just, I wanted to touch on the digital identity one, maybe we flip into a positive note.

What are you most excited about on the horizon at the moment? What's, what's sort of got you really excited at the moment?

Fran: Frankly, accountability. I, I, I'm seeing a, a torrent of information pouring out into the public space. In many countries and people are starting to demand accountability, right?

The, the, the accountability is going to be absolutely beyond what people imagine. It's coming on a global level. People are going to be shocked finding out certain things. But frankly, that's what's keeping me sane, is I know for a fact that this trajectory leads to global accountability. And I, I live to see that.

But I'm also seeing some massive positive development around the world like I mean, all you have to do is look at like Parts of Asia and even some parts of Africa and some parts of South America. And look at their airports and look at their subways and look at their infrastructure and it's beautiful, clean, modern, you know, so on and so forth.

I think that you know, the world's reshaping from a unipolar what do they call it, rules based order, you know, but no one answers the question who set those rules in the first place, to a now, you know, and which is petrodollar specific. And then it's dying, you know, various governments are dumping their U. S. treasuries and bonds like there's no tomorrow. Well, at the same time, they're accumulating as much physical gold as humanly possible at record levels every quarter. So, you know, governments all around the world know that there's a reset coming and it's going to be to gold, not Bitcoin. And we can talk about that in a bit.

And so yeah, I'm just excited to see this kind of like dreadful mixed phase get out of the way and so that we can go to that positive reconstruction phase where, you know, everybody knows a few universal truths and we're all working together and reunited towards building better systems, better future.

Communities and better economies. Some parts of the world are probably going to avoid most of the chaos, like possibly parts of Argentina, parts of Central America, parts of Asia, and places like Roatan are showing what five years from now, Bitcoin City will look like. And it's super exciting, it's like.

Why don't we build awesome public spaces again? Like, where's the billionaires? Putting together Greco Roman architecture for beautiful public spaces. It's probably going to be the Bitcoiners in five to ten years time that finance the creation of massive, glorious, you know 1800s world's fair style public spaces.

And That's partly what I want to get into real estate is, is some of the exciting opportunities with modern material science advances and advances in super light, super strong composites and materials. You can solve a lot of, like, homelessness with some of these new materials with super cheap, sturdy, long lasting accommodation, whether it's 3D printed or something ancillary to that.

I'm excited about the tech, I think is the best way to answer it. We're going to get so many toys in the next two decades. You know, personal drones to replace congested cars through automation and AI. We will. relieve ourselves from burdensome, repetitive tasks so that we can focus more on, you know, creative tasks that benefit communities and society.

Kevin: Cool. How does this play in with, with, I guess, Techemy's, you know future and, and, and thoughts around that? Is there anything specific that you're weaving in with, with companies and things like that at the moment?

Fran: Well, currently I'm trying to solve a problem, which is that there is no decentralized money market in crypto.

You know basically there's trillions of dollars in trades daily in the legacy world for dollars. And now that various different national currencies are being expressed for stablecoins, what the, what the world needs is a piece of infrastructure for absolute finality and settlement of basically foreign exchange on chain.

And as well as gold and silver and other tokenized real world assets. So I've been incubating a project called Stable. finance that assists in that, that built that infrastructure. And that's tying up my time for a little while, but after that, I have been slowly putting together what I think I'm going to be working on for the next 20 years, and that's Vulkan. capital, which is about the creation of private equity funds that are listed and registered as full securities, so we have the primary market and the secondary market of that, and we want to buy real estate, we want to develop beautiful public spaces, commercial real estate, residential real estate, First then Prospera and El Salvador and then as countries kind of go for a reformation in policy like Argentina is the next contender two to three years from now, a private equity fund that makes it easy for anybody in the world at a few clicks of the button to get exposure to the growth of, say, the real estate sector in a country that's gone through that level of change, because real estate is the first place that pops after drastic turnaround policy has been put into place, right?

And then we can create these private equity funds tokenized on the Bitcoin blockchain. Registered under El Salvadorian laws as full blown securities, listed on Bitfinex securities as an exchange platform, and we can do it for technology, we can create proxy ETFs for entire countries but, you know, we start with real estate because that's the one that needs it most and is the first to pop so to speak, So yeah, the future is uncertain.

I've got, you know, a portfolio of different businesses and exposure brought to crypto space. But it's been so long, like I don't know how many years now. I think I something a little bit more physical, it's You know, I've got a hunger for something a bit more physical and I think it's a visit to Prospera and meeting this, the executive team there and talking about their vision that made me realize we can build entire cities and we can do them right and we can embed them with technology to solve transportation and housing and payments and sustainable energy, agriculture, all of these different things with Like technology that's ready today, you know, five, 10 years time. So that's what I'm excited about from a work perspective.

[00:53:19] Digital Identity and privacy

Kevin: Wow. That sounds amazing. I'm glad I asked that question. Maybe dialing it back a little bit. We touched on the digital identity stuff. And we mentioned Australia's digital ID bill. We're also seeing, I think there's been a change in Japan as well, where they've started to tie identifiers to individual people's bank accounts to start sort of passively checking certain behaviors and things like that.

How do we, how do you think we win In terms of the, I mean, we need some form of digital ID operation process in order to, to sort of gain our own individual powers back. What's your take on how that plays out vis a vis what's happening with, with governments and, and sort of centralized ID bills and things like that.

Fran: Well, I learned the hard way spending millions of dollars building a self sovereign identity solution. That's. Corporations and governments, they don't want the power back in the people's hands. They want to use technology stacks that are centralized, particularly around identity and money. So the world needs self sovereign identity.

There is a really cool layer one blockchain coming called Tari, T A R I. com. It'll be the biggest launch since Ethereum, and they have something unique. It's built by the maintainer of Monero for the last decade or so. Excellent cryptographer, Ricardo Spagni, you know, interesting, colorful character, if you Google him, and is winning over the United States regulators and, you know, various interesting lawsuits.

I mean, that was, that was amazing. I mean, here's the, here's the analogy. American government calls up the South African government and says, we want this human being. And I said, okay, here you go. And then they sue him and they say, you must be a billionaire and you haven't paid your taxes you know, because you've been working on this for so long.

Forget common sense and practicalities, you know, you just, you must be, you must have done something wrong. And he says, well, I had a terrible boating accident. And they said, prove it. And he said, no, you prove it. Because that's how the law works. And he won. That's literally his defense that he used. Because he can't just poach someone from a country and say, we think you're a criminal and, you know, this is your invoice.

And that kind of showed the, the teeth of, you know, there's a, there's a huge hate by the establishment against privacy coins. You've seen a delisting of privacy centric coins. And so what they've done now instead, I mean, this just kind of shows their hands, frankly. They're so frightened by an anonymity, and that's partly why I think these ETFs are being approved.

Because it's, you know, not your keys, not your coins, it's not your Bitcoins, it's the ETFs Bitcoin. And that could potentially be nationalized under certain conditions as well. We can talk about that if you want, but Atari has something called Composable Privacy. So it means that like if I have your Wallet on whatever chain given.

I can pretty quickly figure out, alright, here's a salary payment coming in, here's a I don't know, he's out drinking there. And he was doing this and spending money on that. And here's an asset he purchased. Whereas with Atari, that's all anonymous. You can't see each other's transactions. But when you go for say a loan and you go to a third party, that's licensed, as a whatever financial service provider, they'll say we need to see or records. So you can permission that that person or company gets to see. That's what I mean by composable privacy. It's a really elegant, hybrid that I think is gonna prolly launch at like a multi billion dollar market cap because it's just such a glaringly obvious and massive problem that is being solved.

And so the same thing goes for identity, it's like, if I want to interact with some business or government agency, and they specifically want my, I don't know, birth certificate, or diploma, or proof of address, I can permission that, and they pull it, so it's not pushed, and, you know, you don't just have the whole world in all these different data silos that can be compromised with all this personal information.

I think the Australian government rolled out the draconian digital ID laws on the same day that there was an announcement that they also lost millions of people. Australian Citizens Personal Information and the Data Breach, which was, you know, comical, yeah. And you know, like, once you lock in digital money, like centralized digital money, CBDCs, where you can actually program saying, oh, well, you know, you swiped your card and it's declined, not because you don't have enough credits, but because, basically, you've had too much red meat, and we have, you know, this month, and we have a policy against a certain amount of tonnage, just that and the other.

And then you lock an identity into that, well then you end up with what's happening for years in China. It's like if your social credit score, and of course there will be one, like no one should kid themselves, digital ID, CBDC, equals social credit score. And so if your social credit score is like below 400, you can't take a train or book any accommodation above a 2 or 3 star. If your, you know, social credit score is even lower than that, you're basically like the book 1984, or was a bright new world where, you know, there's, there's just a bunch of savages living in a forest, living off the scraps of society or you comply with absolutely everything of future administrations dictates, right?

It's not the current admin. It's if these systems are put into place, they will be abused by future administrations, that's the concern. So I'm completely against the merging of digital ID and digital currency yeah, into unelected bureaucrats, dictates.

[00:59:31] Global reserve currency

Kevin: And maybe just going back to that that point you made around, around the currency aspect as well.

I mean one of the thought experiments around let's say Bitcoin becoming, a global reserve currency or ubiquitously used around the world is I guess a little bit of a comparison with, say, the euro, for example, where you have, you know, a bunch of different states and some of them have benefited since the euro was introduced, especially the northern European countries, versus a lot of the southern European countries have actually been shown to have not done so well under a Euro standard.

Fran: It's pure socialism, like we're going to rebalance the resources and accounts of these countries, of those countries, especially at a time of crisis, like the Greece banking crisis a decade ago. Like, it's, the European experiment has failed.

Kevin: So how, how in a Bitcoin context do you get maybe self sovereignty is not the right term, but localization flexibility? So within a, within a network state or a, or a country or something like that, the ability to flex when you've got, Potentially a global reserve currency that's really high value but you might have a local economy that needs to adjust its pricing.

And it finds it hard within a local context to do that, this if it has not enough sovereignty around or the ability to kind of do much about it. Any thoughts on how we, how under a Bitcoin global reserve currency that that sort of flicks? Can kind of be adopted as well.

Fran: Not sure if I entirely understand, but I'll try to articulate. Bitcoin is not going to be a global reserve currency anytime soon. It'll take at least another two cycles, eight years, right? Bitcoin is a Swiss bank account in everyone's pocket, until you tell someone your address and then it's no longer private. Everyone can see all your transactions. But it is a permissionless, unstoppable, store and transfer of value. So, at an individual level, it's highly beneficial, especially for those trying to avoid the erosion of purchasing power from, frankly, irresponsible spending policies in the West in the last decades. It is also great to accumulate as a corporate on your balance sheet.

Again, because of the predictable supply and the inability to print more, right? So it's the only asset that they're not going to double the supply overnight unexpectedly. It is also great for instant finality or quick finality, 10, 30 minutes, whatever, for a few blocks between countries or between corporations for settlements.

It was also great to include into various portfolios, whether it's. You know, a private equity firm or treasury of a large corporation, international business to have 510 may be more percent, if the effects reserves in Bitcoin. Meanwhile as I said, that Brooks nations are hoarding bullion, like you cannot imagine demanding physical delivery.

To the point where like silver might do something absolutely insane shortly, might, might just rip the 500 bucks from 30 bucks in a 6 to 12 month period. And the reason for that is, you know, the one is BOR, which is obviously on the horizon and started in some areas. I think they consume something like 4, 000 ounces of gold for every missile and torpedo.

So the DoD in America is the largest consumer of physical silver on the planet, followed by SpaceX and NASA and other space related industries, followed by think the electronics sector and then speculators after that. So by banking, you know, They're basically consuming more in technology of silver, particularly twice as much per year than it's dug out of the ground.

So it's not like Bitcoin because who knows how much gold and silver is in them, their hills, right? Still buried on the ground. But it's deflationary in a sense that it's consumed at a rate higher than it is mined. And that's useful for. Backing currencies with because then you know that you have something that is deflationary instead of inflationary backing a national currency.

So the way that I see the world for the next decades is that Bullion is going to back national currencies. And Bitcoin will slowly be incorporated into those national currency backings, but may just end up being not just a global reserve currency, but more like a international trade and settlement consideration at the sort of governmental, international level, and then on a personal level, personal savings, personal store of value.

So I know that a lot of Bitcoin people. Sort of dis gold and silver and everything else. I find that it's completely acceptable to have both. In fact, I find it necessary. Otherwise Bitcoin's simply not big enough. It's not a million bucks, ten million bucks per coin right now, which is where it needs to be to really be, you know, hyper Bitcoinalization, backing entire national currencies.

It's just not big enough. If Bitcoin was a million dollars in two months time, That means the world has really, really bad problems. So you don't want Bitcoin to be a million bucks next month. You want it to, you know, go to 200 the cycle and then a million next cycle and five million the following, you know, over the next 12 years, that sort of thing.

Kevin: Oh, no, I think that answers the question. It's just around multiple forms of money and local ability to kind of transact in something that gives you a little bit of Control, flexibility over something that is priced outside of your control. That might then make you uncompetitive in a global market and impact you adversely.

That was, that was kind of the crux of it. And I think you've answered it. Just conscious of time. Probably my last, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you were thinking about talking about today, or I think we've covered a few things, but anything you want to, You get off your chest.

[01:06:02] Closing

Fran: That would take many hours.

No, look, you know. I think the world's at a crossroads. New Zealand needs to firstly get rid of the media and that's holding back New Zealand so badly. Like, I encourage anybody to start their own independent media. Go buy up the carcass of stuff like RNZ or, you know, use Hub for pennies on the dollar as they're running out and collapsing.

And then, you know, if we have a fourth estate, a lot of these problems will be solved. The next thing is, I think. More people need a demand that the Reserve Bank, or at least the New Zealand Treasury Department, fix the damn money. Right? Because a lot of these problems won't happen and won't be fixed. We need to stop trading towards the sort of digital nightmare that we're just seeing the beginnings of in Australia.

You know, so also go for a reconnaissance trip. It's cheap here. You know, check out Guatemala. It's beautiful. It's next door. You can visit Takao on the same trip and see the ancient Mayan ruins as you investigate, you know, the state of El Salvador. See the old historic Towns like Antigua, which are absolutely stunning world heritage in esco sites.

Three hours drive from the capital of El Salvador. You know, buy some PPOs with, with Satoshi. See a free south come to Bitcoin beach. Like if you're thinking of where do I go next for a, for a holiday? Well, you know, this third world country's infrastructure is a little dilapidated, but even if you get into trouble and fall off a bike, the hospitals and dentists are actually better than some upstate New Zealand.

So it's kind of patchy, right? There's first world stuff all over the place. But it's, you know it's not everywhere. It's mostly concentrated. The quality is concentrated in the, in the capital. And the rest of the country is totally being built out, so I encourage people to just check out Central America and start with El Salvador and check it out for themselves.

Kevin: That's awesome. Yeah, I lived in Chile for a year and I remember getting my wisdom teeth out and Yeah, it surprised me just how professional it was and how cheap it was. So there's definitely experiences like that that you can have that yeah, will, will change your worldview.

Fran: I think you can literally pay less to get your teeth fixed in El Salvador and the flights and accommodation and have a great time for a month than it would cost in New Zealand.

Kevin: Yep. Awesome. All right. Well, we might stop at the end. Unless there's is there any questions from, I was going to say the gallery, from the people watching maybe come off mute and have a, have a last question before we sign off. No? All good. Thanks for your time, Fran. It's been yeah, I've really appreciated this. So nice to chat. Be good to check in again, and maybe another 12 months or so. We'll see how much of Maybe some of the world has changed according to what we've been talking about today. But yeah, I really appreciate it today.