Ezra Marcus

Yeah.

And they were trying to do it instantly, which is crazy.

Yeah.

John Woltz comes from a small town in Kentucky.

It wasn't like rural poverty as his parents work.

There was nothing to do with coastal, liberal, elite, high culture.

And John independently found his way to tech and had lived in Silicon Valley for a while.

He lived in the Bay Area, but he moved back home and was involved in all these sort of initiatives to

bring Bitcoin to Kentucky, these sort of like local coding initiatives.

Yeah, he was just sort of this seemingly stable guy.

And then somewhere in there, he and Will became friends.

And they became very close, seemingly pretty fast, at a time when John was seemingly either already going through mental health issues

ups and downs, becoming pretty unstable, or was about to.

But they basically, at a certain point, they buy this outrageous mansion in Paducah, Kentucky, that's called the Smith Mansion, modeled on the White House.

We're talking like,

columns out the wazoo like marble floors stately grounds in this otherwise low-key rural town i mean it's a total non-sequitur building it has these these crazy vaults and tunnels underneath it and they moved in and it was they were just sort of like off to the races they had like 60 typewriters in a room that they would spend all night typing messages to each other because they didn't want to communicate digitally because they believed they were being watched by spies will was

talking about running for senator in Kentucky.

He was going to take Mitch McConnell's seat.

And they started hiring political consultants to have meetings with them.

And it