[Music] I didn’t realize the scale of this. I would have come sooner if I had understood the true scale of this. The hurricane did a lot of damage in Florida, but it’s nothing like this. This is once in a century, probably once in a thousand years. This amount of water hits this area. Yesterday, I volunteered to go with the team that is looking for loved ones, looking for the remains of loved ones that are still missing.
The process involves a team of volunteers that come from all over. They go out there with a dog that marks places, and we’re just doing manual labor, pulling pieces of houses, cars, and random stuff apart until we find one of the loved ones that’s missing. All the floodwaters from that road up there came down and converged right out there where that truck is, then just came back this way. My little house that was sitting on that form just disappeared; there’s nothing left—not even a piece of the wall or roof. It’s as if it just lifted it up and carried it away. We didn’t see it coming, but we’re strong people. We’re very strong, stubborn, and tough, so we’re dealing with it.
These people here, Dominic was the first one to come. I met him after I had just seen the property. I call him my storm warrior because he was the first one in and the first one to ask if he could help. He’s the one that gave me faith, hope, and lots of love. He’s my new son.
[Music] We have no cable TV, no internet—nothing up there. We just got power two days ago, so we were completely cut off. We couldn’t get any news of anything. I had no idea this had happened. I was hoping that it wasn’t a lot of damage, but I didn’t know that everything was destroyed. For about seven or eight days, it’s just unreal. I keep saying this is a dream; I’m going to eventually wake up because this has to be a dream.
Seeing the destruction in Burnsville and hearing the story brought the team to tears. Installing an aode here and connecting the disconnected was no longer just a mission; it became our purpose.
[Music] We are outside of Asheville, North Carolina. They already have a Starlink here now, and this Starlink will be providing that call to a radio.
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
You have connectivity?
Yeah, that’s awesome!
How does it feel?
It feels wonderful. I tell you, it feels great.
[Music] [Music]
It’s night and day. Ever since this, I can call anybody anytime. My feet have been on the ground here, and I’ve been able to make a phone call, and it’s been just fine. It’s seamless; it’s so easy. I can’t believe it. It’s all the smiles that you’re bringing to these people. You just see them perk up with a sense of joy. It flows with our mission of “together we’re unstoppable” and connecting the unconnected. It’s a prime example of both meanings. The stuff that Starlink and World Mobile are doing is hard to describe. These people are so grateful when they’re stranded in the mountains with no way to talk to anybody. They have no connection to the outside world—there’s no cellular anything. Just to give them the ability to communicate is huge.
[Music]
Welcome to the new frontier of connectivity.
[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
It’s incredible. We are so tethered to connectivity in today’s world. Without a phone, without connection, I mean, my aunt lives on a hill in Asheville, and we didn’t have connection with her for about a week. We have such connectivity these days that if you cannot connect, you think there’s something bad. What you all are doing is the goodness of blockchain. Take money out of it; that’s the beautiful thing. You don’t have to because it’s nearly a $3 trillion market, so you can incentivize people to actually connect the unconnected.
What we did here was a beautiful entry into the United States of America. We’re already in Reno, Utah, New Mexico, and California, but this was a moment for us where we could act and send the message. Thanks to people like Starlink, Charles Hoskinson, and the World Mobile community, we were able to reclaim control. We were able to help where others couldn’t help. We’re able to do things that other people can’t. When we say we’re together, we’re unstoppable. This can be the biggest movement in the world. Everybody relies on technology.
We look at crypto; you can’t use it without the internet. It doesn’t work. You look at banking the unbanked; you can’t bank the unbanked before you connect the unconnected. This is just one example of how nimble the community can be. At World Mobile, any other project, it’s a huge risk to take someone with you from the community whom you’ve met once at an event. It’s nice, but that’s how busy World Mobile is because we deliver. We’re doing something that nobody else in this crypto space is doing, and we’re very proud of that.
You’re doing stuff that FEMA wasn’t even able to do. This is unbelievable to me. If we’re talking about impact, crypto having impact, blockchain having impact—watching that video and seeing what you guys accomplished is one of the most impactful things I have ever seen when it comes to blockchain and crypto. The impact you guys had on those people—think of how they were terrified. They have no electricity, their cell phones don’t work, and they have no battery. Then you guys come in and say, “Boom!” Fifteen minutes later, you’re setting up a network that people can access.
Let me ask this because I don’t know if this was covered. How does that work if there’s maybe no electricity in that area? Is there something solar? How are you guys connecting?
So, yeah, go ahead, Emanuel, please.
We also had generators with us in case we needed electricity. In most of the areas that we deployed in, we had electricity, so we didn’t need to use that. But just from my perspective, I’d like to thank the World Mobile sharing economy. Without you, it would have never been possible. As Adam and Mick mentioned, together we are unstoppable.
The way it started, I was actually in Manila in the Philippines for meetings, and I saw a post, as you guys saw in the documentary, by Oanon. He was just reaching out for some help with disaster relief efforts and connecting the disconnected in North Carolina. Within 24 hours, I found myself in a group chat with Adam and Alex, who were on the ground there every day for months, delivering food, water—anything you name it—and pulling out bodies from the ground. Within 36 hours, we had a plan with sites to deploy our solution in with local support from The Savage Freedom Ops, who are incredibly amazing at what they do. They were there helping out with logistics and search and rescue missions.
Twelve hours later, within 48 hours, we landed in Nashville. We went directly to the Swan NOA Harley-Davidson location, which you guys saw in the documentary. It was the main hub used for distribution of food, water, and logistics. We were welcomed there with open arms. We had a plan, and it was go time. We went to our first site at around 11:00 p.m. that same evening we landed. Our mission in North Carolina couldn’t have happened without the support of our good friend Charles for lending us his Blackhawk helicopter and his pilots for assisting us in delivering our solution as quickly as we did. In many of the locations, instead of driving three to four hours through the broken roads, we just took the helicopter, which enabled us to go into places that weren’t accessible.
So we’re forever grateful for you, Charles.
That’s awesome! I just want to say how badass it is that Charles Hoskinson has a freaking Blackhawk helicopter. That’s pretty cool.
We used it for really good reasons. We had to go in and out to connect as many sites as we could in the short time we were there. As you saw in the documentary, our solution was up and running in 10 to 30 minutes, whereas traditional communication packages take a very long time to set up. In North Carolina, around 90% of the poles that carried all the fiber and cellular were down. You can imagine how long it would take just to redo all that infrastructure.
I just want to jump in here and say that we have rules and regulations that require sharing of infrastructure in these kinds of situations. The problem was that the wireless infrastructure was down, the roads were washed out, and the fiber is usually along the roads on poles or buried. Everything had been washed out; there was nothing there to share. These guys came in with the solution. A lot of times, you have to wait for the electricity to be restored, but you can use solar and wind-powered devices to create the electricity that these things can attach to.
It’s something that I think the government needs to look at. FEMA should have a whole stockpile of these things, whether we’re dealing with fires, wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes—whatever we’re dealing with. We need to be able to get these installed. Every state should have access to these things, whether it’s the state governments or the federal governments that are in charge of whatever is going on. A lot of times, the states require federal emergency help, and we just need to be able to get these things deployed quickly all over the United States.
On that note, this is a disaster situation that you just exemplified, but of course, this goes well beyond just disasters. It seems like we’re having more media coverage or more disasters. It’s just a nonstop roller coaster of disasters. Much like Emanuel was able to reach out and get plugged in, are there ways that people can get involved with World Mobile to help this mission?
Secondly, I saw a question here in the live chat. Someone asked how this is on blockchain.
Every air node, every one of those devices that you saw, talks to the blockchain. Every air node is owned by a sharing economy. Every transaction that happens on a person’s mobile phone—their location data, the information, the battery status, whatever it may be—is all stored across the Earth node network. That’s the blockchain we have.
It’s really important.
Charles, jump in.
No, no, no. The chat was asking me to verify that my channel hasn’t been hacked because I just have a loop.
It’s a Charles Hoskinson loop. Every element of this is on-chain, and it must be on-chain because it’s not okay that the mobile network operators ask us to trust them. When we can see, just when you look at Google, the reality of our data, we should have access to our own data. We should have access to our own understanding of how much money we’re making when we buy something—not just have a report that’s pushed out to us by a centralized entity.
How do you expect that to ever grow? Only a few people would trust. They’re only trusting right now because they have no other choice until World Mobile.
We also found out another piece of information on this stream. Maybe, Charles, you want to jump in?
Sure. You guys didn’t tell me, but the Starlink guy is actually my cousin, and I didn’t know that.
So, my cousin Michael Corel used to be in audio-visual. He did all the AV for Kings of Leon, Gaga, and all these other people. Then he woke up one day and said, “I want to work for SpaceX.” So he became an aerospace guy and got a job at SpaceX. He ended up getting pushed into the Starlink division, and I just didn’t connect until I saw the video. I said, “Holy [expletive], that’s my cousin!”
So you guys were flying around on the Blackhawk, and I wish I knew because I would have called him and been like, “Hey, Mike, that’s my helicopter!” It was amazing to see Black Betty out there. It was a heck of a humanitarian mission because it carried thousands and thousands of pounds of water, food, and generators. I think more than 40 generators over the entire mission. I’d have to pull up the logs to see the exact numbers, but those guys were working 16 to 20-hour days between the pre-flight planning and everything.
The highlight of the entire experience was working with the World Mobile team. That’s where they felt they did the most good because when people got connected, it wasn’t just getting connected; they could call loved ones who hadn’t talked to them in a while and didn’t know if they were alive or dead.
Can you imagine if you’re an 80-year-old grandmother living in New York in a retirement home, and your daughter is sitting in North Carolina? You haven’t talked to her, and you hear about all these people being dead. You don’t know if your daughter’s alive or dead, and you’re just worried sick. Then you get that call, and it’s your daughter. That’s what connecting the unconnected means, and that’s what we were able to do with this type of mission.
Our guys are all SoCal guys, and they flew missions with the 160th and these other groups, so they dealt with really rugged terrain in Afghanistan. The military comms infrastructure they had was so much worse than what you guys put in North Carolina. They said, “God, I wish we had this when we were in the field.” It just shows you how great the technology is, the professionalism of the team, and the impact it has on people’s lives.
The fact that everybody just came together and figured out a way to get it done despite the fact that FEMA didn’t show up—that’s how we do it in America, and that’s how we do it in the cryptocurrency industry. People just come together, and everybody brings something to the table. Some people can bring a Blackhawk, and other people bring a Starlink. Some people just bring their time and effort, and if they all come together, guess what? You save lives and make people’s lives better.
I just want to give some credit to Christian Rhee, who’s not here, and Adam, and of course, Emanuel and Oceanic Goon. Emanuel’s a strapping young man; he’s got muscles. But if Christian Rhee, who is an artist and a photographer, can learn how to deploy a network within 15 minutes—something that would typically take a telecom company maybe two weeks or longer—and Emanuel, our Chief Investment Officer, can jump in the back of your Blackhawk and deploy a network, this means we’ve built our sharing economy.
Those nodes were not just for World Mobile customers. Those nodes—AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon—anyone could roam onto those nodes and use their cell service. This is a solution that actually can scale. This isn’t a deep in GP; this isn’t a deep in compute. This is a real-world product that is able to go anywhere, everywhere, and connect everyone. Everybody should have connectivity.
Earlier, you talked about disasters. Reno is a disaster—fortunately, not a natural disaster. It’s a disaster for connectivity. We were there within nine months, 10 months, with 80% connectivity. Things that took the traditional legacy mobile network operators years to build out and hundreds of millions of dollars, we did through Operation Anode. We built out a network and connected thousands and thousands of people, and we’re connecting thousands more. Soon, in the United States, there will be hundreds of thousands across our network. We have close to a million now in the United States of America.
Through 2025, we aim to bring millions. This isn’t a movement that’s driven by me; this is a movement that’s driven by everybody—everybody that’s listening to this, everybody that will listen to this, and everybody that participates in the World Mobile economy. The reality is without everybody here, we can’t do this, but with everybody, we’re stronger than anybody else. That’s the truth.
Beautifully done. It’s just such an amazing story. It’s very inspiring how you guys were able to come in and fix some things that others weren’t able to do nearly as quickly. Thanks to Starlink as well.
If I could just add one more thing, I think people are used to watching state media and traditional news outlets. The information they get from there is not necessarily what’s actually going on. Being on the ground there, it was truly amazing to see the camaraderie among people from every single walk of life—whether you were a dentist, a construction worker, or a CEO of a large corporation. They were all there distributing food and water, and Savage Freedom Ops were assisting with recovery efforts. Starlink enabled the World Mobile solution. Everyone really came together.
One of the scenes in the documentary showed “FEMA” written on the windshields. I’m not going to speak on behalf of FEMA, but I am going to speak on what we did and on behalf of what the people are saying out there. The power of the people and the fact that policies and politics are not a roadblock is astonishing. During the toughest times, like what happened in North Carolina, that really brings out the best in everyone.
To close this off, I’m very hopeful for the communities in North Carolina that were struck, and they will come back better than ever.
Oceanic Goon, do you have any final words on this? I know you were part of some pretty awesome stuff. What are your final thoughts?
My final thoughts on this are humbling. A lot of centralized companies, if they get a message from someone who’s not involved in their company and says, “Hey, help,” they’re not going to involve that person. They’re going to say, “Oh cool, thanks,” and then they’re going to run with it. World Mobile has pushed me in such a great direction in my own life by giving me leadership in this. Emanuel calls me and asks, “What can I do? What can we do?” I honestly don’t know. I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting you guys to reach out.
Not only is World Mobile solving global humanitarian issues, but they also put the community first. They don’t put themselves first. You don’t see what these guys are doing behind the scenes, but they’re working 12 to 15 hours a day, sometimes more. That’s because they care, and they’re passionate. The fact that they let a community ambassador member take charge for this is an incredible testament to World Mobile.
You’re a badass, not just an ambassador.
I like that. That’s the new term—badassers.
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