NPR. As reporters, we often get sent to conferences, and it can sometimes be a challenge to make that exciting.

Would you agree with that, Lisa?

I can confirm, yes.

Lisa Hagen, you're joining us from NPR's Democracy Team.

You recently covered a conference in Las Vegas.

Yes, hi Darien. I got to say I had kind of high hopes for the part of the conference where they premiered an anti-vaccine short film

Plandemic The Musical.

What your religion is, masked up the children, shut down your businesses, socially dissident didn't stop

and he's okay Lin Manuel Miranda meets plandemic it's sadly got my attention yes

unfortunately the real meat of the gathering was less musical entertainment and more about

how anti-vaccine propaganda may get funded in the future.

The event was called Replatform The Freedom Economy, and it was about building a kind of parallel financial foundation for anti-vaccine activists, certain kinds of religious conservatives, and the far right. These are groups who believe

they're under attack by massive financial and tech corporations.

You are with banks that hate you. They hate who you are, they hate what you stand for, and

they show it by spending millions and millions and millions of dollars shutting you up.

Okay, well at least on the indicator for the next nine minutes we're not going to shut up,

and we're going to talk.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darren Woods here with Lisa Hagen.

Today on the show The Freedom Economy. What is it exactly?

How would it work? Is it already here? That's all coming up after the break.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wise, the app that makes

managing your money in different currencies easy.

...