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It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing. The role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash all. Righty gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, March 16th, 10:40 AM Eastern Standard Time. Michael, Liam, How are we doing, boys? We're good excited to be here. You guys would love the lively conversation between us before on where do we start and how how heavy we go into Bitcoin. But before that, I got to throw back Brian back on the spot. Where are you recording from today, Brian? It's nice and quiet. Today, yeah, I got a little quiet room at the local Equinox. There's there's only so many quiet rooms and so when I have a ton of background noise, it's because the quiet rooms are being used. But I was able to find one today. So got an A nice and nice and peace quiet here, But as you mentioned, we're going to start with Bitcoin's price and Michael's going to kill me. But this is this will be brief. I swear this will be brief, but I do think it's worth calling out. This is a what you're looking at here on the chart is Bitcoin's performance versus a bunch of other assets since the war started effectively a little over 2 weeks ago. Now Bitcoin kind of ripping this morning over 74 K and you can see here it's out performing everything else. Why is this relevant? I think a few reasons. To me, it says seller exhaustion. It says what we talked about a little bit last week around gold being stuck in Dubai, people realizing it's hard to move gold in size. Bitcoin's very easy to move in size. Maybe people waking up to the thesis generally around a digital store value asset, but also in the context of business building. I think you know, what we've said for a long time in the show is that you use Bitcoin as a as a superior store of value and you go out and you produce value in the world. And so if you, if you have both of those things in tandem, a lot of what we're talking about in the show today is everything going on in AI, but there's a lot of a lot of chaos in the world, generally speaking. But I think if you can tie these things together in a way where you're producing real value, you're meeting the market where it's at and also storing your value in, in a superior store value. Things are going to, things are going to work out for you on the other side of that. But I did want to move on. I I want to keep that brief. Yeah. I mean, I think go ahead. I think the reason where we're having a lively conversation is, is more related to the show being about capital markets, investments, what what what matters, where the world's going. But I do like that Brian brought it up. There's two parts. There's one is I hesitate to cherry pick any divergent from gold and Bitcoin. People will start calling that out, but we all know, you know, it's very easy to pick the shorter timeframes. What I will say that's super relevant here and I think underpins everything that we do in this podcast and I'll just pull it up really quick was the the recent, you know, we had put this out from on ramp. And then I read the numbers really quickly around what Brian was effectively saying. And whether you're an individual or business, this is the backdrop against everything will be measured and successful look like in the future. And the tweet is 3200 and four $32,400 became a little over $88,000. No trading, no timing, no leverage, $100 a week into Bitcoin since 20/20/20 January 2020, independent of COVID crash bear markets, FTX, everything under the sun. And I think that is where Brian was alluding to a sharing is because ultimately this is the game is to accumulate, store your value and time in a better form of money. And whether it's an individual or a business, as more people get that, they're going to outcompete others because they're just going to be holding a harder form of money independent of any of the timing or who's at war, who's not at war. And that's the thesis of everything we build this what we're building on. 100% well, well tied into that, that DCA visualization, because to your point, it's, it's not like a one time thing like you just buy Bitcoin once and you're, you're good. It's it's about a consistent strategy around storing your excess productivity and value in this form of money. But I did want to get to a pretty interesting story from last week that Michael, you'd written a, a long thread about, but Travis Kalanick, former Uber is launching a new company. Maybe I'll just kick it to you. Michael, I think you've, you've dug into this a bit, but it's in the robotics space. And I think he was in Austin with you last week talking about this. So go for it. Yeah, I mean, I think there there's a few things I think to go right on the the Travis deal. I'm not really sure why, but the guy has a like special place in my heart. So I think part of it was being in the Wework era and like SoftBank and this was call it in just general tech. It's been crazy to see the last two decades and just changes from like South by and Austin. If you think and know the history of South by Twitter, Uber, a lot of these things were launched there and it was generational time between call it 2010 after the OA crisis to 2020. When you think about Silicon Valley and the growth of these firms and they obviously had their cracks. There was a lot of capital that went out and that, you know, got blown up, but there was also a lot of generational businesses and Travis was always interesting and Uber was because a they were, and This is why I always liked, you know, the Wework angle was you were taking physical infrastructure and then you were somewhat digitizing or bringing it like to the, you know, twenty 20s, twenty 30s and Uber, he stumbled into this. He talks about it, but ultimately went from like, you know, and I use this example a lot with with cars or taxis. People think the total addressable market was X and it was really why? Because once you're able to create efficiency within, how do you hell a vehicle a that was an untapped market than the market couldn't understand there was a need for. But then you start to go into logistics and what does it mean to move atoms or around? And if anybody knows the Uber story, why it's super fascinating was because it really took a maverick and somebody that didn't ask for permission, but for forgiveness, because everyone understands that. And it's very it always reminds me. Maybe that's a special part as he was like a bitcoiner before being a bitcoiner in the sense of in the same way Cam duty was that he effectively had a vision and he understood the way to get there was having to be very savvy. The example was where it used to get a lot of slack was Gray ball, the regulators and understanding what cars they were driving or how to skirt when a regulator was going to take a car in a city they couldn't operate. They played hardball with a lot of different cities. Austin was one of them. They they left and they were able to pull in. They went into China when nobody was able to play. So it was a lot of things he did and that made him a really successful founder, but also rubbed people the wrong way, ultimately led to him being ousted by Bill Gurley and benchmark for the big investors. Why that's all important is because just knowing businesses, knowing how people think in his his personality, I told a couple of close people was like, this guy's going to come back with a vengeance one day and and he's probably going to be the CEO of Uber again. And so everyone that you know, kind of relates or follows tech, he had left Uber back in 2017 or kind of got ousted after his parents died. And there's a whole thread on this, but the Long story short was he effectively went ghost for eight years and just started building what it was at the time called cloud kitchens. And it was effectively disintermediating the notion of like having to build a restaurant, then get it into a human person picking it up, put it in a car, delivering it, and just vertically integrating that whole stack. There were ghost kitchens initially with humans operating them, but then eventually going to be retrofit for robots to like, make the food, put it in the car, autonomously go and deliver it. And that's just the 1. And so we've been working on this for eight years now. He's coming back. He's looping in a lot of other things as part of that. It's this new firm called Adams. But I just thought this was really pivotal because there's another angle that's starting to happen with the Musk's of the world and what we're seeing with even A16Z and some of their founder LED companies. Palmer Luckey's another great example that we went from the managerial kind of allotted, you know, class of people that were managers and that were able to be diplomats. And we're going back in a world where AI and interest rates actually matter and the cost of capital matters back to a world where founders actually matter. And I think that this was just a very serendipitous like timing of that new world coming. And then him coming back is it's going to be a real great renaissance for like world class entrepreneurs who had a story historically been completely vilified and like ostracide and like marginalized into the corner. Like they're back. And that's like the most bullish thing you can think of, especially in a world where people think AI is going to kill jobs. He has a master class of that 60 minute TVBN pod of explaining how positive all of this is for humans. And he was specifically calls out the plumber and that they're going to be like the Michael Jordan in that world, because as and it reminded me of the cost of production, right? It's like everyone knows as gold rises, people go and look for gold. It's the same way as plumbers become more expensive, they're going to be more plumbers and you're going to draw that part of the market down. Not enough people talk about all of that. Yeah, I think that's really well said. And there's a lot of Dumor ISM out there. I think there's just more and more opportunity as, as a cost of everything goes down, the marginal return on capital is going to be more and more positive for all these businesses, not just necessarily ghost kitchens and and robotics, but there's going to be so many new opportunities that are created out of this. And I think that just in addition to that, it's it's going to be to managerial point. We can go or we're definitely going to hit some of this later till, but it's just going to be more and more important to have lean teams be able to move and adapt incredibly quickly because everything is changing so fast. And the layers of bureaucracy that are built into all these legacy firms. And you know, having to get 35 layers of sign off in order to do anything important is going to be a massive net negative to to all these large businesses that are going to just have to compete with people who are moving a little bit faster out there. So definitely excited to follow along with this company. Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean, I guess the question in my mind is like, how far away are the humanoid robots from being able to do the plumbing at a high level? Because the that sort of analogy or that example of the plumber being LeBron makes sense to me intuitively. But like, what is the time scale on that? Because ultimately, if we believe all this stuff to be true like that, eventually is is replicatable by a robot, is it not? Yeah. But I mean, that's like saying like, what do we need stable coins? Because Bitcoins going to be the layer. It's like in 100. Years. Well, that's why I'm asking what's the what's the timeline? Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at if you look at his trajectory and you just think about Uber starting innocently at retrofitting a couple cars and then you go to opening up the angle. And I think the the real great sign of an entrepreneur is just changing their mind in real time because I think he somebody posted where he like has switched from believing that humans would be, you know, like dispensable or like not around or not needed to. Now he's understood very deeply what you're asking around Then like Waymo's another example of like the amount of Waymo cars. Sure, nobody's in the car, but then you actually have to manage them from like a command center. And then what are the other like second or third order jobs that I think his take at least to start is Musk is working on like some of the robotic stuff that still has to get to production and go. He's working on the transport and more of like wheelbase storage. So the things that you would basically they like intermediary period. You're asking him out before you're going to get to this part where there's a humanoid. And then the other aspect of that is really around there's really like societal, cultural things that have to take place even sometimes more before the tech, right? Like Bitcoin's a great example of the tech can operate today and stablecoins can operate today. But how much time are we going to have before like the rest of people adopted and are willing to park their capital? And then there's going to be different parts of the world, right? It's like the whole notion of the futures here. It's just I didn't like distributed in the same way. Like how many people will allow for a robot to come next to their kids or their house versus somebody else? And so I think we just have like a long window of the aperture and everything changing there. Yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, before it becomes super ubiquitous and replaces all plumbers there is there's an interim step where maybe it makes specific plumbing companies a little bit more efficient, but is not like a full scale replacement of all the humans doing plumbing. That kind of makes sense to me. Yeah, there was some, there was something on Twitter today about like some or yesterday in construction where I think it was plumbers or somebody that goes to the deal and whoever's using it is using AI already to either take pictures or transcribe. And then they're already like ordering the stuff. But before we transition, just really quick, a couple things on this thread. I would encourage anybody that finds any of this interesting to really go listen to the Marc Andreessen David Cerna podcast. I don't know what they did if they posted it on a 16 ZS and David Cerna's or both. But the point being is a lot of these things that we talked about, they're just like cycles of the past when you look at like semiconductors to the browser, really good anecdotes and there's really good books on this aroundthe.com and even pre.com that help in just like the mental models. One of the examples they allude to is just like CAA and you know, where A six and Z was modeled after. But why I'm bringing that up is because in the same way that we are going to end up with founder LED, these founder LED companies succeeding it, we're going to end up in the same place where it's going to be founder LED VC companies. This was the whole notion of how A16Z came about is they were operating in this gap, writing C checks after they made some money and their previous companies, and they found themselves writing the smallest check, but having the most support and help because nobody else was paying attention. Like they didn't understand how to help the founders. And so as we go back into this world and there's even quotes like JP Morgan was like writing checks into well, he was running the bank. I forgot where the the main. It was like, Oh, Thomas Edison and like everything that he did with, I forgot one of the, there's a couple like main businesses. But point being is that that's where it's going to come back in this world when you start to realize that we are in uncharted territories, territory. And the reality is the managerial class existed because when nation States and other large conglomerates like Ford and these large companies, you need managers to ultimately do it, but you need the founder 1st and then you could potentially need the manager. You can't take the manager and try to like make them into a founder. And so this is just where the market's going to go. And I think it's important to look at that. And then the only other thing to call, or I'll pause there. If there's anything to say, we can, we can transition. I'll figure out the rest of the takeover stuff later to touch on. No, I think that's really well said. I think the important point too is now I feel like every company is almost going to have to be refounded almost once a year or once every few years. It's going to be or more difficult to just do the status quo and get your recurring cash flow and operate as a status quo just because of how fast everything is shifting. So definitely agree with all that. Yeah, just on that last point, Liam, I, I didn't put it on the list, but Shamoff wrote a next article last night that was talking about terminal value generally speaking and being like, well, how do you even forecast future cash flows at this point? If like everything is disruptible, if software goes to 0, it kind of speaks to what you just said of like you kind of need to refound or re underwrite the business constantly at this point because it's becoming very, very difficult to actually with any degree of conviction, like forecast future cash flows, which is like how valuation has worked for decades. And if that changes fundamentally, part of what he's pointing out is like, well, it could have like disastrous impacts for the stock market because if like all of the equities today are based on these long term future cash flows, like what does that do now? There's an interesting point in there where it's like there's this sort of like self reinforcing check in the sense that like if that were to happen and then the spend for AI could dry up, which then slows down the disruption, right? So it's like there's kind of a natural check in there and that if that were to happen and there is a massive equity sort of collapse, then that actually slows down the rate at which things are being disrupted and then gives you more of an ability to forecast cash flows. I. I agree with what you're saying. I think that the I'm not even. Saying I agree with this, I'm just characterizing what the argument he was making. Is Yeah, I think that they're just going to be massive dispersion and volatility by single names. And there will be some who can go out and reinvent their business and, you know, capture the what was perceived to be existing moats or recurring cash flows of other businesses out there. And there will be others that are too slow to react and adjust their business. And those will go to 0. So I think it's going to be a lot more volatility by single names. But overall, I'm I'm bullish on, you know, the general stock market as a whole, just given everything that's going on. Check out early riders.com for all the latest in Bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show. Yeah, maybe that's a good transition because the dispersion's a great way to frame the layoffs and the things that are happening right now. I know right before Friday closed, it was Meta reporting 20% layoffs. And then I forgot, I think this was just might be somebody from Anthropic. They, they seem to love touting the disruption or no, that's, I don't know who that is, but it was effectively saying 90,000 jobs cut in 2026 already and we're not even two months in. I think what you guys were saying was a very, really good night to, not to cite a bunch of content, but there it was a really good segment last week talking about just AI in the job markets. I think there's multiple things happening. One of the good framings are you have different levels of. Way people frame it from like Sam saying that this isn't going to change much and like the jobs and they come out with their own version. And then you have Dario saying like this is going to disrupt everything. And there's a component of strategy there, but there's also a a component of naivete in the sense that this is so new. So when you look at like the Internet and other revolutionary sectors, like you still trying to grapple with how are people going to manage it and how do you go about it? The other thing that I thought was super fascinating in that, in that conversation and it really ties into the founding of early writers and everything we do is the notion of there's the dispersion is happening and two things colliding. There is the incumbents that are trying to wrestle and grapple with how the hell do they manage all this stuff and their people. And then there is the emergent net, new startups that are just native to that. And from somebody that sits on the other side of that, I would take those bets generally 10 out of 10 times because you ultimately are moving with the wind and you also are moving from a framework and foundation that requires less entropy. And you're just like swimming in the direction of momentum versus having to reorient. It's not to say that Moat status quo and things that are already in place specifically like in healthcare and other things like that, won't, you know, be able to kind of like dig their their heels in and establish some kind of like entrenched themselves in leadership for a longer than a traditional company will. But I think that is the common thing that's coming up right now. And then it's what is the value being added to these companies because a lot of the large companies historically don't know how they're going to get the ROI and you know, they're spending on AI, but maybe not returning that capital versus the net new startup. It baked into everything they do. It's just like being on a different planet. I think that is going to be just the battle of the next 10 years. And just speaking with folks close to the block situation, you know, when you look at like that's how they've been mapping their business for the past, call it, 12 to 24 months, that's really where Cash App and every like that team was running lean and flat. And that's effectively what they're doing. And the beauty and this is something we should probably write about or, or, or talk more about. It's who I was talking about. This was referencing. It would take a Bitcoiner leader to to do that, right? Because you have to have like not only visibility and foresight to understanding the future, but you also have to have the courage to be able to not only manage your team internally, all the people that got laid off that were friends with it, but also the public markets to be able to deal with it. And that's just getting ahead of where ultimately you're going to eventually have to lay these people off either way. And so I just think it's a very interesting time and you kind of see different areas of the market looking at it through their own lens versus just like, where is the market going? What are you going to be rewarded for? Well, you mentioned, you mentioned managing the public markets and I think why a lot of people found the block story interesting from a couple weeks ago is because the stock actually jumped on the news of, of cutting 40% of of the workforce. And so I think we are entering to your point like this very interesting time where I think you're totally right that basically everything's up for grabs in the sense that people can rebuild incoming businesses at, you know, 110th of the cost with a fraction of the people pretty quickly. And I think the market knows that. And so basically if you are an incumbent and you are and you do have a pretty large workforce, I think it's basically like if you don't cut some amount of that bloat, like people are basically assuming and the market will assume that you will be outcomputed. So like, if you don't make these cuts, then there will be negative public market perception around your business because it basically signals that you're complacent and you're just going to wait around to be disrupted by that newer company that's going to move faster for cheaper, more quickly than you. And so I think it's, it's a, it's part signaling and it's part real in the sense that like, you know, I've, I've found the metal one from last week a little bit interesting in the sense that the way that they positioned it wasn't necessarily solely on like, oh, we're using AI and we're so efficient that we don't need these people. It was more like we're using AI so much that we have a lot of spending requirements that like we actually can't afford, so we need to cut these people. Now. They also said they're using the tools to be more efficient, but that wasn't like the lead of this headline at least. So I found that somewhat interesting. But I do think that there's a lot of signaling going on with a lot of what we've already seen and what we're likely to see going forward with a lot of these sort of AI related or AI adjacent light offs is like if you're an incumbent and you have any amount of bloat, you need to send a single to the market that you're at least using the tools and you're thinking about this in a real way that could protect you from being disrupted, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of Bezos and your margins. My opportunity, like it was easily forecastable. When the market compresses, the money becomes harder. Just doing more with less is the only way to do it. And you're either going to get out competed. And that's the the thing people just don't recognize as the headcount is a liability, not a badge of honor. And that's what it was for the managerial class for 30 to 50 years. And there's just a rude awakening coming. Sorry, Liam. No, I agree. I think that it's also while this this is layoffs and they're going to be people out there saying, oh, there are going to be no jobs and technology anymore, everything's going to zero. I think that we're firmly on the other side of that. And then in addition, I think that it's going to be really interesting how larger teams really try to they're going to have to reorient team structures I think a number of different times. You know, it's something that better used to take, you know, however many engineers design folks as well as product managers like they can just do that so much smaller. And each of I think that you're going to see of the large companies who can manage this the transition well into a new world, just operating as almost a bunch of different pods out there that are trying to act as startups for different products and and services out there. And on the other side, they we're going to see more and more dispersion between folks with really high agency who are super valuable. I know that Meadow was paying $100 million signing bonuses to some of those folks earlier this year, too. So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's just what what they're doing. Yeah. I mean, a few other things to call out on this before we transition is there's something that we've been talking about as it relates to the hyperscalers and like utilities, and it's starting to become more increasingly clear. I mean, they're even referring to it. I think Sam Altman, who's referring to intelligence being like electricity or a faucet where you're just going to be able to turn it on in the same way. Coding will be very similar. And there's not a lot of people saying this, but this is, there's a few things happening right now. 1 is the dynamic from specifically US and China. There's no shortage of studies right now out where the US looks very unfavorable or unfriendly to AI versus in China, they're embracing it. And I think that really matters into where you sit in the US. You've seen this in New York where they're becoming increasingly antagonistic around legal and medical and you can't use it for the things that like most people would need and democratize. And so I think it's important to look at it through that lens also from the angle if, if you have these things that historically, like imagine, you know, clean water or just so from plumbing all the way to just like being able to drink, like what that meant for civilizations that didn't have to live next to a body of water. And the flourishing in the same way that if you're able to just turn on intelligence or specifically software for everything that lives around us that needs to be optimized and be more efficient or people can become engineers. Like the level of flourishing, the amount of companies that can be started, that is just an insane amount of innovation and positive outcomes for us as a country where that ties into certain states, specifically Texas. I was in Austin. There was a Bitcoin takeover that happens every year around South by. But it was interesting because all in was there, they had Travis talk. David Sachs had his grand opening party that night for his new craft ventures. Travis has been living here for five years. You just start to see like you got to be very careful with where you pick you want to live. It's been like this always, right? When you think about Silicon Valley and economic density, yes, you can start a company anywhere, But when you think about the favor favorable notion around AI, it's me starting to think more about it around the Bitcoin side because there really isn't a Bitcoin city like there's a there was Miami is a crypto city, but everyone kind of knows that's like fast fleeting. But if there's a way to incept and it doesn't have to be Austin, but Austin feels like the front runner around the same way where you look and there's charts around the amount of energy production for data centers in Texas. It's like 3 times any other state and so you start to build that like inertia and that philosophical bent and you start to be able to be in the right place for building. So I thought that was worth calling out. The only other thing is, and you'll appreciate this Brian, because we haven't talked about it. So Michael Goldstein Bitstein founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. It's a 5O1C3 so it's a non profit. But the core idea I didn't fully appreciate. There was a dinner and at him Pierre and others talked to about in about the early days of Bitcoin, very fascinating. But the core idea was effectively, I don't know if canonicalizing is the right word, but but to build a repository that cannot be changed or altered. And specifically under the context of how much slop is out there, when you think about AI or just think about the past five years, if anybody's been in Bitcoin pre 2020, it's a fundamentally different level of energy vibes and also understanding of what the asset is and what it was meant to be. Specifically think about reducing counterparty risk for better or worse, whatever you like and don't like about stretch. There's 5 levels of counterparty risk embedded in that versus the underlying asset. And so there's so many people that don't know any of that Genesis story and what it stands for. And if you, as everyone knows, like if the news is already a little bit mucked up, imagine what like history books were like. And so there was a real just importance of being able to build this repository. They said it a lot more eloquently, but I just thought it was very fascinating to have it phrased in that way that there needs to be an institute that captures all the podcasts, all the content, make sure that they're never altered. They gave this one example. I forgot who it was. His name's Michael. He's an old. I believe he was a core contributor. But the point was when Craig Wright was trying to fake that he was Satoshi, he had signed with a PGPI. Guess it was a GPG key and that he went into the archives of the the update to the software and what he said he signed wasn't even because he was able to go and find the time stamp of whatever he posted wasn't even around at that time until you need that level to be able to go back in time and show all the different things how you got here why you can't go, you know change things. Austrian economics were obviously a fundamental part of that that most people miss as you need like scarcity. I just thought that was a fascinating thing to call out because hopefully we'll get them to come on and talk more about it and some of the vision, how it's grown. But I don't think enough people. I didn't fully appreciate it knowing I knew what they were doing, but I didn't appreciate the gravity or importance of it until kind of like hearing them discuss it. Yeah, that's, that's awesome to hear. Huge amount of respect for those guys and and what they've built. I mean, it's curious on the like, in terms of unalterable information, like are they embedding all of this stuff on to the Bitcoin blockchain in any sense or is that not part of this? Like how do you actually ensure that it doesn't get altered? Because like I think you undersold the media news situation we are rapidly being hurdled into where like no one knows what's real. And like this war effort is like probably the best example I've seen thus far where it's the most overt in the sense that it's impossible to say what's real online because someone will say this is AI And that's, well, how do you, how do you, how do you disprove someone that says it's AI? It's, it's becoming very, very murky very quickly in terms of videos. But I mean, I guess what we're talking about is more like written word, which is I guess if there's, if there's time stamped records of it, then you'd be able to like cross reference and know if something had changed. So I guess it's a little bit easier than like just like deep fake videos and and being and being very difficult to discern what's real. But was there any anything here on that side or was it more just like we're creating a repository? No, there was, it was in the very beginning, it was a bear on cryptographic proof time stamps, I believe using Noster on the back end. But you know, we'll, we'll definitely have them on to talk about it because it's really worthwhile 'cause if anybody is looking to offset taxes, you can donate and it'll be good for him to share that. But I think one thing that I maybe do better justice of is contextualizing the importance. And because we don't really know what it, because we're so deep, you know, in the middle of it is there was real versions and independent what people are showing on Twitter, like real sources talking about Coinbase trying to get rid of the de minimis or not include the de minimis use from taxes around payments. And I've heard from others, some of the largest, you know, advocates of Bitcoin, trying to explain to others that Bitcoin can't or should it be used as money. And you can see how that becomes more into the atmosphere zeitgeist. If people like, yeah, it's a store of value. Stablecoins are the thing. Don't worry about it's like 2 things can be true in the sense there's an order of operations and I do diverge a little bit from peers that I respect on that. Bitcoin's just not ready yet to be used at scale for payments, but it will be there when people's cost basis are lower in the plumbing and it's easier blah blah blah. But the point being is it's still true that if Bitcoin works, it will be a form of money. That's the beauty of Bitcoin. It's a money and a currency. Gold was money, it wasn't a currency. So you had a layer on paper notes on top. Bitcoin, because it's technology can be a store of value while still simultaneously being a unit of account being used in different scalable methods. Point. I mean as nobody talks about that. And there's a reason why, especially the part like the larger players, think about the sailors or the Brian Armstrong's of the world, because they have their own versions, their own stablecoin, their own companies that they're building high velocity transactions. But that example, if you go back into a repository that has Austrian economics, how money moves, how money grows, you start to create a better understanding for the market to coalesce around or when somebody goes down the rabbit hole, understand what wasn't changed or altered versus what we're seeing today. And that's just like a small example, you know, block sized wars. There's just no shortage of things that you got to go back to the basics because it's just going in circles of the same stuff. There was a funny anecdote. There's a gentleman that's really behind the scenes. He was like patient zero here in Austin, I think before Bitstein and and Pierre. And the notion was that those guys, I think either, I think it was before they got on the scene or maybe they had taken a little hiatus, but it was around. There were certain people back in like 14 and 15 that were on Twitter talking about crypto and all the stuff. And they're like, Hey, we, we need you to come back on the Twitter. And they, they referenced it to a knife fight in a phone booth. And how, you know, Pierre was just like, either like this is their words, like just fucking people up. Because, you know, on Twitter, you just have these like notable people, like the shifts and all these people out there expounding on these crazy things. And you have these like 2223 year old kids just completely wrecking people. And so, yeah, it was, it was really cool just to to see like in the middle of all this craziness, Bitcoin at 6970 thousand, there's still a group of individuals that were able to get together, really explain, understand and think about the importance of like the source. And there was a lot of relevance to like biblical times and like being able from Old Testament, like a lot or like even Roman times. Just everything that has been captured, how it been changed, and how you ultimately want to preserve that version of history. Or on a long enough time horizon, it'll be dissolved into something else. Yeah, well said. They're doing extremely important work. It's funny. Just not hunt Pierre. I I always get a kick out of someone, someone recently, it was probably 6 months ago, but someone was like, why do you fight with these people on Twitter? Like why are you wasting your time talking to Peter Schiff and the replies is like, it's purely love of the game. Like it's, it's love of the game. And so that's we need those, we need those freedom fighters on the front lines of Twitter for the love of the game. Something before we we move on. No, I was just going to say I love the Nakamoto Institute. I think I mean, regardless if anybody who really wants to, you know, put on a significant allocation to the industry or work in it and invest in it, I think that just like the history of every other industry, you should really know the origins of it. Everything that's coming before in the past, what has worked, what hasn't, why things operate a certain way grounded in history. And I think that the Nakamoto Institute does a fantastic job of that. So I would highly recommend checking it out if you're seriously trying to like learn more about the industry as a whole. All right. I got a quick question for you. So if your Bitcoin double tomorrow, how would you feel about how it's currently being secured? I feel like most people have not actually thought deeply about this question and I frankly don't have the best answer. And that's OK. I mean, I was there before and I talked to people who self custody and they've done it for decades. And I also talked to people who sit on centralized exchanges and could just never get comfortable self custody. And honestly, that's why we build on ramp. You have multi institution custody, you have Lloyd's of London insurance, you have inheritance planning baked in and you have a team that can walk you through all of it. So it only takes about 15 minutes or so, if you can believe that. And you can book a consultation directly on our website on rampbitcoin.com and I'd be happy to speak with you. It's a free consultation. Speak with either myself, Cam, Michael, Kellen, someone on the team will speak with you and reach out to us anytime. Hope to see you soon. Very well said. All right, we're going to shift gears here a little bit and talk that we're going to move to Michael's favorite sector of the show, the digital asset roundup, the stablecoin roundup. There's a bunch of headlines from the past week or so. I'm going to start with something that dropped this morning and then we'll kind of cycle through a lot of these. But Abra is set to go public via SPAC merger at a $750 million valuation. Abra, for those unfamiliar, they've been around a long time. They were founded in 2014 and you know, there's, they've sort of had various pivots over the years. They had some regulatory run insurance in 2020 and then again in 2023. But their founder, Bill Barr Heights, actually a pretty fascinating dude. He was originally at NASA or I think originally at Goldman, then NASA, then Netscape and then sort of got the Bitcoin bug in 2011. He he gave the first ever Ted Talk on Bitcoin in 2012 and then founded Abra in 2014. Like I said, a few different pivots. They were originally a little bit more retail focused, part of the regulatory trumbles they had were with their Abra earned product in 23. But now they've sort of pivoted a little bit to be more institutional focused, high net worth focused and they do more than just Bitcoin. They're trying to move into real world asset tokenization, all that good stuff. With Michael, curious if you had any thoughts on these guys, just given they've been around for a while. And I think this is interesting to see a lot of these companies who've basically survived a lot of trials of tribulations, not only from a cycle perspective, but regulatory pressure. And now we're getting to go public and access public markets, which is pretty exciting for them. Yeah, I don't have a lot. I mean, I know that they got in into some stuff, I think legally and also potentially halting redemptions on the urn. So this is a SPAC. I don't know if it's considered like fully going public via the traditional way. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I don't, I wouldn't be bullish on this. Yeah, I don't have a lot on on opera. I think the only thing I would say the only thing. I was just going to say they settled with the SEC in August 2024 without admitting or or denying the allegations, but they said that Opera earned customer assets plus interest had all been returned. So yeah, I mean, I'm not saying I'm bullish or Barrison either. I just think it's interesting to see these long standing companies that have managed to somehow survive for 10 plus years kind of wild. Yeah. I mean, I do think that, I mean ideally it's this year or next year. I do think a lot of these companies, independent of their kind of profile, investment profile, are going to do really well in the capital markets just because I've long held this belief that in the same way AI is hot right now, digital assets will will be think of it like Public Utilities. Again, there's just so little amount of infrastructure when you think about circles valuations, just solely based on, you know, this reality. There's no real access to stable coins in the public markets. But yeah. Yeah, I completely agreed. And regardless on the individual stocks, I think that you know seeing ABRA Gemini that go a number of these companies that are gone public or are slated to go public in the immediate near term. I think that once Clarity Act gets over the finish line, you're going to see, you know, likely hostile acquisitions of some of these publicly traded companies out there. And think that there is, you know, probably there are just so many legacy financial players out there who would love to get infrastructure that's legitimate around digital assets as a whole. And so think that more of these being in the public markets is definitely going to continue. And just because a lot of the the companies around that have been around since 2014 have uncertainty around like what what financials really look like etcetera. So being in the public markets will definitely get some more hostile takeover acquisitions, which will be interesting. Yeah, when you didn't mention in that, that list that you just riled off was Kraken. Kraken's been in the news a ton over the past couple weeks, initially around their plans to go public, but then receiving a Fed master account last week, conditional master count and then this, this headline, which I just pulled up their partnership with NASDAQ to plan for 24/7 token. That stock training. I mean, to me, this is just very indicative of what we talked about a lot on this show is like everything's kind of morphing into one in the sense that if you're a crypto player, you're going to offer stocks. If you're a stock sort of incumbent, you get an offer crypto. Even if you're a prediction market or a GAMBLING SITE, a casino, you're going to get into stocks or prediction markets or the other way around. Like everything is kind of merging into these sort of quasi super, you know, financial super apps of some sense where they want to own every part of your financial life, from gambling to saving or investing. And so I think this is pretty remarkable just in the sense that Kraken, very similarly to Opera, you know, they had their own sort of disputes with the SEC over the years. And now it really seemingly been given a massive green light to not only look and feel more like a a bank in the sense of the master account, but then also, you know, look and feel more like a traditional financial services platform with this partnership with NASDAQ. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think it ties into some of the other announcements, specifically Wells Fargo filing their trademark for WFUSD. And then there was another company raising, you know, for stable coins that there is this, it reminds me very similar like parallels to the AI stuff we talked about earlier that, you know, there's going to be different like bookends to the story. Like we're starting here, we're starting with digitization of money and, you know, economic value, whether it's tokenization dollars on stable coins or BTC. And right now you have different levels of moats. Your tack can be somewhat of a Moat, but I think over time that'll be somewhat commoditized, very similar to like frontier models. But then the real Moat ends up on brand and brand is a proxy for distribution liquidity, the amount of, you know, staying alive through a lot of this kind of like craziness. In the next 10 years, when you think about everything being digitized, a lot of Wall Street's going to have to replay what crypto and Bitcoin has understood. If you're still around around counterparty risk being very conservative. And so I think our angle in thesis ties into the point that on a long enough time horizon, Bitcoin A will be the, the predominant, you know, value storage and everything will trail into that. And so you want to have that bent and then work backwards on what are the other assets that you'll be thinking about what it's money, How do people preserve and store their wealth? And if you do that a long enough time horizon, you have the right technology, you'll win the right type of clients, and then you'll be there to absorb the rest of the capital. The other side of it, whether it's Wells Fargo, you know, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley's coming at it from the traditional asset side and trying to layer in these assets in the same way cracking sits in the middle. Cracking's an interesting dynamic because they have liquidity and clients, but they're more of like trading high velocity. And so everyone's trying to make up what is their thesis. And it goes back to, you know, the person generally wins. That's looking at a 10 to 100 year time horizon because they're not looking at, I forgot there was a, there was another great pot. I won't site here because I have something planned for it, but it's effectively like you only have two time frames. You should be thinking about probably in everything, whether it's your life, life or but definitely in business is one week or 10 years, right? Because in a week you can get a lot of things done. But if you plan for 1/4, it's like 1/4. How many things can you actually get done? And then you start to lose time. It's like a week is a great timeline for a Sprint to really get things done. And then in 10 years, what's not going to change and where is the trajectory? Most people will tell you got to focus on the quarter of the year. And I think it's fundamentally wrong. It's like, what is your like? Because all 1/4 is, is made-up of individual weeks and running at that pace. So I do think like that's our edge. And the interesting part is focusing on Bitcoin. How do you preserve it for large holders in the best way? Because the expectation is that large is material for everyone. And as more and more people hold a material percentage of their wealth, balance sheet, institutional side into that asset, they're going to naturally go to the place that unifies all that together versus these other people are still playing a different game around dollars. And ideally, if we're right, then it works. If we're not right and Bitcoin's not money, then probably gonna end up in the best position. Bitcoin is money. Yeah, You, you rattle off a few things in there, which I'll just, I'll pull up for the sake of it. But there was a, a company called Cast Stablecoin Fintech, which raised 80 million at I believe a $600 million valuation. We've seen a lot of these types of deals. Seems like companies in this general vicinity of stablecoin fintech having a very easy time raising shit loads of money. People on this cap table include Left Lane Capital Peak, XV partners, HSG, and DST coal partners. Any thoughts on that one specifically? There was also Mastercard's announcement, which I mean, I didn't put a lot of weight into this. Like this kind of reminds me of a lot of like enterprise blockchain stuff we saw in like 1718 where it's like a crypto partner program, this consortium of people coming together to do something, work on crypto. It's very vague, sort of high level. And you can see some of the names involved here, but it's a lot of just crypto companies effectively. And I saw somebody, our our buddy Matt Dines point out on Twitter, like, you know, where they had some infographic announcing this thing and it's like, well, where's Bitcoin? It's like, well, Bitcoin would never be on this list. Like you can't partner with Bitcoin and, and have them be part of this like consortium group. Now is MasterCard thinking about Bitcoin? I would hope so in some sense, but I wouldn't expect them to be part of this announcement. Like these are all just crypto companies. Yeah. I mean, if you go back up there, there are some larger just in that list, there was Sofi modern Treasury, which is modern treasury. I I mean, I wouldn't say this is a nothing burger. The thing that it reminds me of is Tempo and then Libra initially. Like the game is around payments is you want to lead bank crack in fire blocks across the river. I think the idea around payments is you need it's the whole Metcalf's law, like what is one payment provider or one stable coin value. But as you connect the second one and a third one and a fourth one that grows. And this is their version of like kind of building their own network that will adopt whether it's a stable coin they're going to be announcing or their payment network to rival what Visa is doing, which is interesting because I don't even know where Tempo like that was always the understanding with tempo and Stripe coming out is let Stripe had been agnostic to the merchants or the the card issuers like a Visa or MasterCard. But eventually if you launch your own payment network, you start to become antagonistic. And it was always going to end up in a way where there's, there will be some friction at a certain point. And that's what this reminds me of is like they're realizing, OK, this is happening now we have to kind of dig in and see who our partners and how we build our own liquidity profile around payments and cross-border. And then the other thing that you had almost cast and I think to your point, yeah, there's no shortage of companies right now. The thing that's widely misunderstood by the market is there's an arbitrage for companies specifically outside the US because the the ability to get a dollar bank account is pretty straightforward in the US and then maybe you can find a few like Sofa and others to get any kind of nominal interest on your money. But outside the US now almost any company or even in the US can build a company for people outside the US that give you virtual access to bank accounts, dollars, interest, which historically had not been there. And that goes to the meta point of the new administration and really want to further the dollar. And I don't think most people have woken up to that because that's going to drastically in the same way AI is going to like change economic and equity value to these like net new challengers, whether it's the startup or the company like Anthropic or the new companies. And this is something that I just thought of it. I was thinking about over the weekend, like, I don't know any, any public equities, but I was like looking at clot and or anthropic and they're gonna go public and looking at their growth and it's just insane, right? And everyone's gonna use it and the value blah, blah, blah. But then I was like, well, what's a higher level ROI is everyone building on clot because they will, they're like naturally started off on a lower base, but they're going to get the same benefits of this technology. And they can be in the physical world. They can be in any world. But however they figure out to disrupt a sector and then leverage these new models. And that's really kind of the thesis of what we're building here at early riders and investing is that you're looking at these companies and they can be in the real world. They can be not in the real world and like meaning moving atoms or just like in the, in the physical world moving bit or the digital world moving bits. But they're a like having a level of agency that they're rebuilding from first principles. They're rebuilding with Bitcoin as a hurl rate. They're rebuilding with AI 1st. And then they're going to leverage these front team models that are effectively subsidized. Because I think it came out that like for every, you know, 200 bucks you're spending a month, you're really getting 60,000 in compute. And that is where value will accrue. And that's really our thesis. But the same angle here is the companies that are building these native net new neo banks, these digital banks that anybody can now build. Historically that they were only allowed if you had to get a banking charter that's effective what people are able to spin up now. And so you're seeing a lot of capital go there. All right, I got another quick one for you. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? I know it's a heavy topic, but it comes up every single day and I think it's worth addressing. In fact, I know it's worth addressing because if you're like me, you think about Bitcoin as a multi generational pursuit. And quite frankly, if you don't have an inheritance plan, then it may be all for nothing. I know it sounds like potentially an exaggeration, but it's, it's honestly true. Bitcoin's a multi generational pursuit. If you don't have an inheritance plan, your family cannot confidently, reliably secure the asset. Then what's it all for? And so I've thought about this a lot. My situation has changed over the past several years and I no longer just have to think about myself. And so even if you're someone who feels confident managing your own keys, you have to ask the question, are your loved ones, is your spouse, children, whoever it is in your life, can they recover your Bitcoin? And so with on ramp inheritance planning is built in directly into your multi institution vault. You also have Bitcoin that's segregated in your own wallet and it is insured by Lloyds of London. And the best part is it only takes 15 minutes to get this set up. So if this sounds intriguing at all to you, you can book a free consultation on our website on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, related directly to that, something we want to touch on is Palmer Luckey's Erawar Bank, exactly what you're talking about. It's like let's just rebuild a bank from first principles rooted at stablecoins. I don't know how. I mean, I know Palmer Luckey himself is a is a Bitcoiner and in Bitcoin a long time mining in the early days. So it'll be interesting to see how much this venture is focused on Bitcoin in particular as opposed to just stable coins and other crypto assets. But seems like it's pretty, pretty focused on stable coins in particular. Anything else you wanted to touch on on on this these these comments from him? No, other than I think like the real alpha and value is when you take two disparate ideas and you mirror them together. And I think that the banks and the companies that take what you're talking about, which is what they know in stablecoins, money movement, and then they help educate. Because the reality is nobody's really been incentivized to adopt Bitcoin or because there's no real ways to really make money out of it. If you don't have a differentiated custody solution, then you don't do it. But if you're really able to bring your clientele in and then help educate that as their savings accounts store their value, those are going to be the winners in the future. It's just right now money movement is related to dollars. I think that just ends up being in our, in our bubble that we, we always call out Bitcoin, but these companies are savvy, they're going to back into it when the time's right. You imagine $150,000 Bitcoin and they're, they're definitely going to become a Bitcoin bank or have some angle there. I think it just takes time. And and then the last part is, I was talking to somebody close to the, the, you know, the, the Bitcoin community this past weekend or week. And rightfully so, like these people actually haven't got into Bitcoin or Bitcoin only when you think about it like who's had liquidity events, like what companies on the Bitcoin only side have had M&A or had insane success that have crossed the quote UN quote chasm that you see that the bridge as a great example are doing. So I think that this just takes time, but you have to like take those two ideas and figure out how to commercialize them for a like mass market appeal. Because if you went to Palmer Luckey or whoever backed and said, hey, we're going to build a Bitcoin bank, you may probably would have just like, laughed him out of the room because, like, what are you going to do at this Bitcoin bank? Yeah, that's all fair. Quickly, couple things. This was just from late last night. We covered this on the show a few weeks ago, but black pills had previously halted redemptions. Now they're filing for bankruptcy. Not a ton to add there but just worth worth highlighting. Did we want to talk about Drunken Miller? He did an interview. I'll be honest, I haven't watched the whole thing, but he's talking about stable coins and he also had some comments about Bitcoin which makes it sounds like he perhaps sold his Bitcoin. I don't know if he owns Bitcoin anymore. Do you guys have any thoughts on this? I mean, I didn't follow if he sold. I saw the, I saw that people were saying, you know, what's going on with Druck on the Bitcoin side. Would the thing that I called out, we should probably go listen to it to see the full clip was Druck Miller saying he expects global payment systems to run largely on stablecoins within 15 years more efficient. I mean, this is all pretty straightforward stuff. I I still think that it's under looked at is where stablecoins will fit into this story not only in global finance but why they're so bullish for Bitcoin. But yeah it says Drucker Miller said Bitcoin has probably secured a role as a store of value in question how long the US dollar will remain the world's reserve currency suggesting maybe replaced in 50 years. So I don't know who why he would be, why he would sell that. I think probably this is the ideologues getting real up in arms around the guy that held a bunch of Bitcoin saying stable coins will also deliver value to the world as my. Interpretation that now I'm seeing a little bit more of it The the quote is I'm actually disappointed it ended up being cut becoming a store value because it wasn't originally originally needed for that but it's become a brand and people love it so it's probably going to be a store value. So yeah, that that makes a lot more sense that the the ideologues were coming after him because he's saying, well, stable coins are actually going to be the need in exchange for for a long time and Bitcoin to store value only, which over a long enough time scale. Yeah, I think is wrong. But I think he's right for it for a pretty meaningful interim period as we've discussed. Yeah. I mean, he, Max Levchin and Kevin Walsh are the three advisors for Anchorage. So I'm sure that he has some good insight that Bitcoin actually is providing a lot of value for a ton of people out there. Yeah, and I think, I think drugs, I'm pretty sure he's an investor in bit wise. Think you're right? All right, we had some miscellaneous stories here for the end. Before we wrap what we're watching where where do you want to start? Where do you want to go first? There's a. You pulled the McKenzie one. I think the McKenzie one's just fascinating. Yes, here we go. So this is a tweet about McKenzie built, an AI chatbot. Lilly trained on 100 years of its work, 100,000 documents and interviews. 70% of the 45,000 employees use the tool. Insane number of employees by the way. Yeah, making 500,000 prompts a month, a research firm hacked into it, got full read write access. And I'm assuming it's all out there now, but I thought this was fascinating because like McKenzie was always kind of dead in the water. Like this is the interesting thing that's happening that I think most people don't know, unless you're like actually a practitioner with like Claude. And, and there's that whole version we talked about like .01% using it and then there's .01% using it. And there's a difference between like by coding and all the slot that gets done on Twitter of like people are busy, but they're not delivering any value versus just having to like use it day-to-day in business. And I think when you do that and use it day-to-day in business, you're ultimately understanding how the real edge is, is the human touch. Because if you're a professional or understand certain aspects of a, a sector or business, and when you use the tools, you're able to refine it to come out with an outcome that isn't the model because the model is just a fractal reflection of yourself, but really the average of human intelligence. So everything it gives you is not necessarily interesting. It's how you mirror that and then layer in your own creativity. And so I find it interesting that like Mackenzie is that embodied. They're like the like the average of the human intelligence population. They go into companies and they're able to say in charge. And this is just the way the managerial legacy class had done these things. And so these group of average individuals somehow like captured all this and then leaked it all, which is going to further accelerate their demise because people like, why am I paying you just to go and prompt these things? And so it's just fascinating to see that like this would happen to Mackenzie. And also the reality of like 90% of what you would get from Mackenzie, you can get from a Claude deal. I've never shared this publicly, but like I remember going into those rooms and delivering presentations or working on them and Google Slides. This was back in 20/18/19. And it would the level, it was like you showed them fire when they didn't have to download the PP, the PowerPoint and then upload and make the changes and then re download and make the changes. It was like the notion that you could do this asynchronously was like an insane thing. And this is like this had been around, you know, because at Google, this was GCG suite was embedded there. So you've been using this for like 10 years. And that's just a fascinating place that we find ourselves in. So again, it would make sense that consultants would put all their information proprietary into this thing and then leak it to further accelerate kind of their their revenue weak in their adoption. Yeah, I think that it's also fascinating that I mean these it's probably not a great tool because you're getting 10 prompts a month for only from the 70 or 70% of the employees that use the actual tool. Which just shows that, you know, they either spent a ton of money on this and it's not actually anything useful in there. Or, and just like the people who are at these farms are still so behind on actually understanding how to prompt in order to find all and sift through this information that they have gathered from the past. I would say it's the latter versus the former because I would love the tool because you basically got the 100 years of intelligence from what they did do and the learnings and the client data which is theoretically proprietary versus what we've been trained on. So I think the tool is probably amazing. But to your point, it's like when you get handed fire, you're like, what can I do with it, you know? And so that I think that's the the issue, yeah. I mean, I, I kind of took this in a different way. Like I think it makes total sense that they, they had something like this. To me, it's just very funny that it was you had to have this massive vulnerability and got hacked. It's like, come on, come on, guys like you, you should know better. Or at least like be a little bit more conservative around like the guard rows that you're putting around this thing, which just kind of shows like we are kind of, it is kind of Wild West stuff with a lot of these agents and LLMS and building these things out in the open. Like, we've seen a ton of headlines around these types of vulnerabilities. What one thing before transitioning from this is this reminds me of there's a lot of noise with like chief Bitcoin officer and like, and you know, like that's obviously not needed. You need somebody that understands money and savings and and that's probably an internal person that helps educate the team. But what I do think there needs there will be and they'll be the Mackenzies of this and you see this already on Twitter is like a a chief AI Claude, whatever officer that can come in and, and effectively take these like the top 10% of McKenzie and dissect in a systematic product project, really project management way on the company's processes and then from first principles rebuild them back up understanding the tools, because that was another fundamental thesis on early writers is the notion that 5% of information technology is spent like 5% of Fortune 500 spend is on information technology. So it's not even just tech. It's just anything related to security or anything related to information. They're barely using SAS tools, let alone AI. And so there was just always this understanding that you can come from the other side and I'll compete them. But if you do want to stay alive, you're going to naturally need individuals that can understand the old world and the businesses and really like the the bureaucracy that exists there plus the new ways. And I do think that is going to be a relevant strategy business and then individual role that will make a lot of sense at companies of all shapes inside. Great points. All right, we are over an hour, so we're going to wrap soon, but one more, one more wild story. I found this hilarious, but you remember Pokémon Go, the app where like, you know, you walk around and you you capture, capture Pokémon on your phone. Well, it turns out the 143 million people that thought they were catching Pokémon were actually building 1 of the largest real world visual databases in AI history. So Niantic just disclosed that all the photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go and produced a data set over 3030 billion real world images. Just fascinating. Like just like a brilliant scheme to get this data. And, and it's just, it's interesting because back when, I mean, I think Pokémon Go came out like almost 10 years ago now. So they were so forward thinking and like basically creating, creating this scheme to get all this data that they knew would be super valuable in the future and like doing it in, you know, a totally legal way. But people are agreeing, you know they're checking the box when they downloaded Pokémon Go and just giving all of their GL location data and phone image data to this company. Any thoughts to discuss? Yeah, OK, go ahead. I was just going to say it reminds me of Elon and everything that's going on at Tesla, the order of operations of, you know, building a car, using that car in order to generate a ton of information on driving and how that will help bootstrap self driving cars and all that information. And you know, buying Twitter, creating XAI will allow all that information in order to, you know, create the humanoid robots In the end. I think that similarly, like we all know what the bookends of Bitcoins going to be and how it's going to be global money, etc. But it's going to be fascinating those folks who can use the distribution in modes and everything that they've created thus far in order to actually get in the hands of people and and create products that they like in order to bootstrap their next business, which is probably going to be something that's even of greater value as the world continues to shift. So I thought, yeah, this is really fascinating and has a lot of parallels to everything Elon's doing. And then you know how how the world is going to kind of change over the next decade or so. Yeah, yeah, on that same thread, it that was the there was two, there was two thoughts that came to mind. One was to the positive point, there's going to be a lot of forward thinking businesses that won't look like they make total sense or will come out with more value extracted based on these premises of having proprietary data sets and then being able to do different things. It's probably for every story like this, there's there's really probably 100 maybe without the foresight. Honestly, I wouldn't even question how much foresight versus like this was always in the background. I mean, you can go honestly all the way back down to the founding of the Internet that Google was really just created for AI because he needed to index the Internet, which is effectively human consciousness, human brain. So you needed to create the service to do that, to allow people to find it to an index it, which would have eventually train these models. But obviously they made a business around there. So there's, there's a lot that you can pay attention to. But the the less positive side is just think about everything you're you're wearing or holding, whether it's like your Google or your Apple Watch. And in the EMF that's radiated from that, you probably look into that. But then there's the notion of how much data you're actually giving away, whether it's you have a ring on your house, you have things inside your your home or in your bedrooms, they are all capturing information, They're all training. And then this goes all the way to businesses giving up their proprietary data to Anthropic and GBT and whoever else that eventually where this goes is you're going to want to keep that information to yourself. And it ends up in a very similar format around Bitcoin and Counterparty risk, where a lot of this data and how you operate and the cost of not only the models and hosting, but really training them is increasingly going down every week. And that was the other part that it's just going to bring to the forefront that all this data leakage is ultimately going to be giving up a lot of value and privacy. And I think there will be a strong kind of like kind of pushing against that. I talked to some interesting people in Austin working on very interesting stuff as it relates to like AI, data storage and compute. That works in a very Bitcoin type way. I think we're just going to see more of that. And naturally, you just always end up as the Bitcoin side, being the kind of early adopters they call it, like the dark forest of crypto and Bitcoin, where there's no shortage of bad actors and Bitstein's words, everyone's a scammer. And so you naturally have to start thinking about adversarially about your data and your MO and then you, you don't go take pictures or like, it came out this week, Tinder was letting people, I guess, like there's a new part where they can just surface through your, your photos and then help find a deal. So like, now they have all your not only the photos, but the metadata on every photo where it was taken. There'll be a backlash coming with all of this soon enough. Yeah. Not great. Scary stuff. All right, boys, it's a good place to route. Yes, somebody just flushed, so it's time to go. That was it. It's. Time to go, all right. Brian Brian just flushed. He's he's done. We're all we're all set here. All right. Thanks, boys. Next. Week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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